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Mar 31, 2011

What is the future of NFC? Will it catch on?

Not clear. It's really a question of crowd behavior and culture, not technology.

Despite all the hype about 'disruption', NFC is a small convenience, it doesn't enable anything new. So now your fone is your credit card. Instead of swiping my card i smack something with my fone.

There is a long list of great technologies which offer incremental improvements in convenience, which just get ignored. Roomba - it vacuums for you. Works great! Do you have one? Do you know anyone that does ?

Truth is, vacuuming's not that hard and it's kind of creepy having an autonomous hockey puck to trip over.

Digital alternatives to business cards have existed for years now. But yanno, cards aren't that cumbersome. And we like the manual (literally) control of handing an object to someone.

Read that last line again.

Thought experiment : Take your wallet, and throw it across the room. Hold just your fone.

Do you feel empowered, or lost?

Then there is the question of installing all the POS counterparts. It's a tough sell to go up to Dunkin Donuts and convince them to invest millions in deploying technology that won't gain them a *single customer*, arguably.


Mar 31, 2011

What's the easiest way to understand Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems? Are there statements that have truth values which cannot be determined except meta-mathematically?

Two steps :

First, write a computer program that prints itself out without looking up its source code in memory or on disk. Any language. Hint - you are going to have to use clever string substitution, and use numerical ascii code.

This is tricky, but when you solve it yourself you will have replicated Godel's masterstroke, the self-referential nub of Godel's G.

Then. as another poster suggested, go by way of the Halting Problem. Show that no automated test can exist which tells you if a computer program ever terminates.

Suppose such a test existed, call it Halt(P) where P is some source code.

Write a new program called Spite :

Spite(P) :
if Halt(this-programs-source-code) then hang,
else quit.

This program by design does the opposite of what Halt( ) says it does, hence Halt doesn't work in this case. 'this-programs-source-code' is easy to calculate once you've mastered the self-printing trick.

Finally, convince yourself that the statement "this program will terminate" can be translated directly into number theory.


Mar 31, 2011

What is the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem?

No.


Apr 4, 2011

Why does Apple get more media coverage than any other company?

This has been answered lots of times, my take is this -

They make cool stuff fearlessly. Yea, I know, duh. What I mean is, they do things that typical companies would regard as so reckless as to be unthinkable :

No market research or focus groups. They don't study the market, calculate the price point, and project profit. They don't pass their product around focus groups. It if feels cool to them, they build it and launch it. They aren't afraid to fail (and they have.)

No concern for features : They'll throw out any feature which feel clunky- a disk drive, multi tasking, more mouse buttons. Because minimalism is cool.

Total control of the end-product : They control the manufacturing and every aspect of the end-product. It costs more that way, but crashes are not cool. Device drivers are not cool.

No concern for market share : They won't drop their price, or add features to chase after the non-apple users, or license their OS to alien platforms.

By refusing to get drawn into these tactical skirmishes to gain a few more users, they end up winning the war. In short, and ironically enough, they win the market by ignoring it.

Or, to quote Henry Ford, "If i had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'"


Apr 7, 2011

Is there such a thing as moral innovation?

I think so. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus who started a micro-lending program to lift people out of poverty. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/business/14nobelcnd.html


Apr 7, 2011

How does the United States justify the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan?

No. Japan was already trying to surrender, asking only that no harm come to the emperor.

On July 12 a wire was sent from Japan to the Soviet Union saying, "His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated."

The Japanese deliberately used a cypher which was known to have been cracked by the British. So they also became aware of this surrender effort :

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/31.pdf


Apr 7, 2011

Do people have good experiences with Linode?

I've just started using Linode, and have found it easy to get started with. The total control is nice - I can configure the box to exactly match my development machine. Using ssh -X, I code and debug directly on the thing.

Low cost of entry, but it's got some really big sites on it so i'm confident i won't have to move if my thingie's a hit.


Apr 10, 2011

What are the most elegant solutions that nature has found for difficult engineering, design, and computing problems?

It evolved a rather nervous monkey who could conceive this very question, express it in a persistent, visual form, and broadcast it to the rest of his species using light and electricity.


Apr 11, 2011

Why is Larry Page so adamant or even arrogant on Google's Social Strategy?

Can only guess at another person's inner motivations, but it seems to me :

Google feels left out of the social party since Bing has partnered with Facebook (smart investment, MS.) Facebook recently surpassed Google for most daily hits on the web.

People are becoming less interested in searching the static web, and more interested in fresh information curated by their social net.

So there's a big (perceived) loss of traffic there. Also, Google would very much like to index content based on social relevance (How many Likes? Shares? How many in your social net?)

I don't know if FB allows the google bots to spider these statistics, but even if FB does - it could stop at any time. This is perhaps the motivation behind the recent +1 initiative.

As for the bonus tie-in, and looking at FB's history : part of FB's success story was that it was launched and quickly adopted by a majority of Harvard students.
Harvard students tend to be well connected, intelligent ... just interesting people.
It made FB an interesting place right away.

Google's 20,000 or so employees are similarly interesting folk. L Page may be trying to give them a little nudge to become active themselves in Google's social efforts. I think it's the wrong kind of incentive, personally.


Apr 11, 2011

What are some examples of bad design?

Well someone's got to say it. The Zune 1.0. Brown. (I have one!)


Apr 12, 2011

Why do 32-bit Linux kernels only recognize 3GB of RAM?

good explanation here, http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm .

Long story short, a 32-bit OS has a total address space of 4GB; it needs part of that address space to communicate with various devices.


Apr 12, 2011

What large battles or wars throughout the course of history have had their outcomes determined by the actions of a single individual, or small group of individuals?

The invasion of Normandy was successful, in part, because Alan Turing and company had cracked the Enigma cypher, enabling the Allies to know where the Nazis expected them to land, and to choose a different location.

According to the Imperial War Museum's exhibit The Secret War, Churchill stated to King George VI, "It was thanks to Ultra [the Enigma-cracking project] that we won the war." A bit of Churchillian hyperbole certainly; but a startling expression of the importance of this tiny group of people.


Apr 12, 2011

Why was there such a dramatic fall in Wikipedia's edit rate in mid-2007?

<disclaimer> I used to be an occasional contributor, so a lot of what i'm about to say may be 'subject to verification' </disclaimer>

There emerged a core group of about 500 people who work on Wikipedia 60+ hours a week. Wikipedia is highly gameable - if there's some debate going on, all you have to do is give 2 friends a nudge, who come vote down your opponent.

This group came to assert ownership over the whole project. Now, the wikipedia 'pillars' (principles on which it operates) aren't hard to grasp, so it's not hard for a newbie to come up to speed and start improving content.

But the core group demanded newbies - with low edit counts - supplicate themselves. If your edit count was low, you were wrong - always. Debate them based on the 'pillars' and they would just badger you in large numbers.

I suspect a group of people who have nothing better to do full time than contribute anonymously to wikipedia weren't exactly, um, otherwise accomplished.
Being able to write directly into the top google rank for certain terms perhaps went to their heads. They turned hostile to newcomers.

One particular encounter sticks in my head (yes, it was the fall of '07.) Newbie comes by, and adds a line to an article, quoting a respected, peer-reviewed researcher "People with X often do Y."

Some core-folk just seemed to resent the newbie's presence, and said, "We cannot add that until it is demonstrated with people with X do Y more than 50% of the time."

The newbie, stunned to be explaining the definition of 'often', after 6 pages of debate, said something i found especially poignant, "I can see that you guys have all the volunteers you want already." Logged off and never came back again.

Essentially, a "dictatorship of seniority" emerged and turned xenophobic.

Quora avoids this dynamic by

Enforcing the use of real names.

Allowing conflicting answers to coexist, eliminating the need for debate. The readers can vote as they please.

The most active users do have a 'positive-feed-loop' advantage. They have more followers,higher People Rank, so more readers see and upvote their stuff. But an active user can't come *erase* your stuff, obliterating your work and wasting your time.


The ethic of Be Nice, Be Respectful has taken root deep in Quora's culture. Sure, there are disagreements. They are almost always civil and rarely drag on (just go write a competing answer!)

New people generally have a good experience, which is the key to long-term growth and relevance. Subject matter expects get voted into the stratosphere.

Wikipedia did a great job at collecting factual content. Quora did a better job at collecting the authors of new content.

It created a community, not just a compendium.

This is the reason I think Quora will continue to grow and engage people.


Apr 12, 2011

How could we communicate virtually if the Internet went down?

I am a big fan of all things digital and a rather compulsive texter. But this question made me realize that - aside from my brother in another state - virtually everyone i communicate with - I also see in person at least 3 times a week. (Except for quora!)

i use digital communication to coordinate real-life meeting up. A net/cellular blackout wouldn't affect me much.

I wonder if I'm just older and grew up without all this stuff ... if my (unintended) mode of digital communication is somehow healthier.


Apr 12, 2011

What are the advantages of a 64-bit server versus a 32-bit server?

For a web server : if you expect heavy database load, you'll want lots of RAM (>>3 GB) for memcached. 64-bit can handle that. Only time ive found it makes a big difference.


Apr 13, 2011

What went right and what went wrong with MySpace (product)?

a) myspace didnt encourage/require users to give their real names
So you couldnt find anyone or be found. This became more important as the age of people skewered higher, and ppl wanted to reconnect with far-flung freinds from the past.

b) myspace let users pollute the UI :
Originally a bug, myspace let users upload HTML to their page and bling it out.
Popular at first so they left the bug in. The result was a visual mess.

c) obstrusive advertising : Huge banner ads and popups further wrecked the experience.

d) Facebook made none of these errors and stole the social fair and square. Some have given the meta-reason that MySpace sold out to suits who didn't use the product themselves, while Facebook remained in the control of younger enthusiasts who understood the culture they were aiming for.


Apr 14, 2011

How do you deal with an unreasonable customer in the era when they can instantly bad mouth your business via platforms like Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook?

Perhaps not worry about it too much. People are getting used to seeing the occasional ranting fool. In fact, when I see *no* ranting fool, i start wondering if astro-turfing is taking place.


Apr 14, 2011

Are we just looking back in time when we gaze into space?

Then again, maybe No.

This idea clings to the notion of absolute time, which relativity does away with.
That every point in the universe is marching in lockstep along the same timeline.
Relativity says it's not.

When we look at alpha centauri, we are seeing it as it is now, according to our frame of reference. The timeline of all the bodies in the universe is different for every frame of reference (position and velocity).

Suppose a spaceship were hovering at the midpoint between our sun and alpha centauri, and the ship sees both stars explode at once.

According to alpha-centauri time, we blew up 4 years later. According to earth-time, it was alpha centauri that blew up 4 years later. According to the spaceship, the events were simultaneous. All 3 are right.

Relativity says this is not an optical illusion; that the notion of "when" depends on "from where?"


Apr 14, 2011

What would bring you back to myspace?

It would be cool if myspace could tightly integrate with something like pandora, so others could listen in on my playlist while i do, make live comments, recommend songs, merge stations with mine.

Social music.


Apr 14, 2011

Why is Jackson Pollock considered a great artist?

To me, he was not great so much for what he did, but rather what he undid. The great bulldozer of post-modernism.

Where Picasso threw away perspective, Pollack threw away the whole notion of 'image' - his paintings weren't of anything - they were of themselves. No figure, no ground, no elements - just paint and canvas.

He wasn't alone of course, and other examples of this predate him (as any parent will attest) - but more than any other contemporary he opened the doors to abstract expressionism and diverted the world's gaze from Paris to New York.


Apr 15, 2011

When people lose their keys, where should they look? What are some places where people frequently misplace their keys?

Why can't we have a keychain which bleeps its precise location to a website we can check? *hastens to patent office ....


Apr 15, 2011

Do people become more cynical and irritable with age? If so, why?

Get your question off my damn lawn !!! ;)


Apr 16, 2011

Why do people talk to their pets?

I talk to my dog (corgi mix) all the time, but I find myself modifying my language according to his reactions, so a modified english has emerged.

For instance, the first meal I served him I called "breakfast". He suddenly formed an association with that word, so that any meal is now called "breakfast" (I call dinner "second breakfast.")

Similarly, his first toy was a big rubber 'gumby'. Soon any toy became a 'gumby''. The phrase "gimme-that-gumby" is an invitation to play tug-of-war or fetch.

When playing fetch, I throw him a ball and when he catches it, I hold my arms out at my sides to form a human cross, both to become a goalpost for him to return to and to acknowledge his success in a way visible from afar.

At the dog park, a woman said to me "I notice two things: one - you talk to your dog the whole time you are here and two - you've got the smartest dog."


Apr 16, 2011

Where is my Jetpack?

I think two big reasons :

A technology can become possible - but that doesn't make it economically viable.
There's got to be a couple of lucky accidents for the latter. We're getting into wars just to supply the energy to push us around on 4 wheeled carts. Jetpacks just arent in the cards yet, it seems.

Secondly, futurists usually just extrapolate the present. A jetpack is an extrapolation of the bicycle, the car, the airplane.

What really happens is more interesting - we change direction. We've got something way cooler than jetpacks :

The web and google : all the world's knowledge, past and emergent (getting there, anyway.)
The smart phone : I can talk to anyone, anywhere. I can access the world's knowledge repository wherever I am. I am never lost (GPS). All the music I like is in my pocket.

Rather than just refining existing technology, we went in a new direction.

I'm heading out now, to a cafe. No jetpack, but i've got a backpack. Into which i'll put my portable computer. If anyone responds to this message, i'll see it because the cafe is connected to the information grid. When I get there, I'm going to work on a facebook app. If I do a good enough job and I'm very lucky, it'll spread virally thru the social grid and thousands of people will use it.

We live in the coolest time, ever.


Apr 16, 2011

Why is so much hydrogen being generated in the power stations in Japan?

The fuel rods are encased in zirconium. When they got hot, they steal the oxygen atom from water and release hydrogen.


Apr 17, 2011

Why didn't the Japanese nuclear reactor designers anticipate a tsunami knocking out the backup generators following an earthquake?


Apr 17, 2011

What is the process for creating a Facebook app while protecting my IP?

I would suggest Not Trying To Protect Your Idea. Just skip #1. NDA's are passé, and investors won't sign them.

Your patent application will take years to process. And even longer to defend (and you'll probably lose, there's almost certainly some prior art somewhere that's close to your idea.)

Also - the other elements to a successful launch - execution, money, luck - are unstealable.

Friendster has basic patents on social networking - fat lot of good it did them.

If it makes you feel better, it's cheap and easy to file a provisional patent - it only cost $200 and you don't need a lawyer. Just write a white paper and make sure the 'claims' - the unique features of your product - are in there. Make sure to do this before you disclose details to anyone; any sort of disclosure prior to filing can later be used to invalidate your entire patent by anyone at all - not just the party you disclosed to. Instructions for provisional are here: http://www.uspto.gov/

So sure, spend a few hours and 200 bucks and get it out of the way. Or just forget about it.

The best way to protect your idea is to launch it fast and keep it best.


Apr 17, 2011

Philosophy of Science: If Mathematical conclusions are discovered then how can somebody invent something? Read the description before answering.

This question goes back 2500 years to Plato, and is still a subject of debate :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Platonism


Apr 17, 2011

What should the Winklevoss twins have done to protect their idea?

Wasn't their idea. Friendster, Myspace, match.com. Social networking was old news. The "dating site" they envisioned wouldn't have taken off. Garish, too forward. They did launch ConnectU and could have introduced it to, say, Stanford a few months later. But it sucked.

The Crimson was already suggesting such a social networking site after the facemash debacle. I'm pretty sure Exeter already had one.

There was a sea change in social norms - suddenly people were OK with sharing their real identities online. This came as a surprise to even the FB founders.

What was supposed to be a closed, university-wide social net was stampeded by the world.

Zuck was properly positioned because he shut up and started coding. A thousand white-board wannabees were left in the dust. End of story.


Apr 17, 2011

What entries should be included in a dictionary of social media?

Friend/Unfriend (verb)
Tag.
Viral (in the social sense.)
Flash mob.
Blog.
Crowdsource.
Meme.
Check in.
Facebook suicide (to deactivate one's account.)


Apr 18, 2011

How could the film makers of The Social Network clearly base the film on Facebook, but not have to pay any type of royalty or image rights to Facebook?

the principle of "Fair Use", http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html, in the United States, allows you to mention and even take literal excerpts without permission of the copyright holder, for the purpose of commentary and criticism or any other 'transformative act'. (If I am making a parody, the law allows me to steal like crazy.)

The key is : you're making something different (a movie, not a website) and you're only stealing enough to reasonably achieve your goal.

For example, "Fair Use" allows me to sample any song I want for about 30 seconds, and put it on my web page entitled "my favorite songs."

In the case of the Social Network movie, "Fair Use" allows the mention of facebook, and in the trailer - you'll notice they even show the (copyrighted) facebook page in action.


Apr 18, 2011

Can we travel faster than light? If not, is it within our capabilities to be able to some day?

Relativity does allow for mass to be created at speeds greater than the speed of light (tachyons). These move backward in time. These pose a challenge primarily in the field of linguistics : http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/08/douglas-adams-on-time-travel.html


Apr 18, 2011

What books should entrepreneurs avoid?

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

In a philosophical attempt to defend selfishness in capitalism, Rand tries to consume all the typewriter ink in New York City with such pseudo-profundities as "A is A" and "Existence exists."

Rand's writing is heavily influenced by her childhood in the Soviet Union from which she emmigrated in 1926 and which refused to take her back.

This caused the The Cold War.


Apr 18, 2011

What is the algorithm that Facebook uses to rank your news feed items?

Long story short - yes. My understanding is - the people you interact with most get bumped. "Interaction" comes in many forms - wall posts, co-tags in photos, etc, probably with differering weights. Also, apps like Farmville can buy their way into your news feed. </rumor and conjecture>


Apr 19, 2011

What are the problems with linux for desktop, and what can be done to fix them?

I think Ubuntu rocks - the option to install non-open source drivers at install-time was a big step forward.

It sounds awfully specific, but I think the lack of a Silverlight port is the major drawback - people really like streaming netflix.

This is usually the deal-breaker for people I talk to. And the only thing keeping my windows partition alive.


Apr 19, 2011

Can late-blooming developers ever catch up with the whiz-kids? If you didn't start programming until your 20s, can you pretty much forget about competing with these guys?

Hell yes !

Do not be discouraged just because there are 17 (and 12-) year old coders who kick ass.

This is a non linear field - it reboots and reinvents itself every 5 years or so. That's what's great about it.

I've been at it for 30 years now. When I started, there was BASIC, but it was too slow for games (what we all wanted), so you had to write assembly code. And write your own tools (assembler) to do it.

Then I went to work for the military, and there was FORTRAN on the mainframes. So i had to learn that. But something new was happening, all these Sun workstations, networked together, had more total processing power than the mainframes. You programmed them in C.

I was early 20's then, had to throw out all i knew about BASIC and FORTRAN and learn C. X-Windows. The older generation, who derided our graphical workstations as "cartoon machines" (actual quote) got left in the dust.

Objects! Then came object oriented programming Screw C, it's all about C++ now. Which ripped out half of C and plopped on 10 times as much "++"" to support objects.

Then the Soviets called the cold war quits, so I moved to Cambridge and got to learn from some ubersmart MIT and Harvard people. Screw objects, functional programming was where it's at if you want to do AI. Lisp! Scheme!

I joked to a coworker, "in programming, there is nothing so crippling as experience".

Then the frigging internet happened. There's a scripting language on the server, another one in the database, another one in the browser.

A few (and not many) underlying ideas do carry forward : data structures, loops, etc. But 95% of the actual stuff you have to learn, you have to relearn every time a wave comes.

What remains is a curious and playful approach - just jump right in, don't worry about stuff like 'am i smart enough' - just go build something, maybe an android App or a Website.

The android App would be Java, for a web app I'd suggest Python on the server and some Javascript on the client.

Definitely get an intro to programming book (language doesn't matter, Java or Python is cool so you get a handle on basic programming concepts.)

If you finish the book, you're doing it wrong.


Apr 23, 2011

What do software developers miss when switching from Linux to macOS?

Somebody check me on this, but ubuntu gives you LAMP in one command : http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/linux-distributions/linux-distributions4-ubuntu/1239-install-lamp-with-1-command-in-ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat

Is is this easy on OSX ?


Apr 23, 2011

Is sharing one's personal shopping history likely to become mainstream?

I don't think so. (Beacon.) There is something uncool about sharing buying habits.

People get it. They understand this converts their social communication into advertising. They don't like that. Any more than most people want to walk around in real life huckstering anything to their friends. You can't even pay them to do it.

As Michael Imbleau points out, people do occasionally make recommendations for stuff like restaurants. They know they are doing the restaurant a favor.

It's not a favor they are willing to grant every day - nor do they like being asked to grant it.

Madison avenue desperately wants in to the "social networking space" and yes - there have been some successful viral compaigns. But the larger message to advertisers is : "The social network is Invite Only. You're not invited."


Apr 26, 2011

What are the most ingenious theorems/deductions in graph theory?

Not technically graph-theory, but nearby - from the Putnam Exam, 1989 (i think) :

In the RxR plane, every point one of three possible colors. The coloring scheme is unknown. Are there necessarily two points, one inch apart, the same color?

(Msg me for the answer.)


Apr 28, 2011

What are the most iconic photographs of the United States flag?

Don't know if this qualifies as 'iconic', but it is painfully emblematic of america's long struggle to realize the "true meaning of its creed." Pulitzer Prize, 1976.


Apr 28, 2011

What are the most iconic photographs of national flags?

The fall of berlin - the soviet flag is raised over the reichstag. The bloodiest battle in human history which killed 10.6 million soviets and 4.3 million germans
comes to an end.


Apr 28, 2011

What are some of the most epic photos ever taken?

Complementary pairing : Watson and Crick with the first model of DNA.


Apr 28, 2011

What is the all-time greatest failed Internet startup?

Friendster.

Not in terms of market cap, but in squandered opportunity.

They nailed social networking first. With real names. The essential ingredients of Facebook.

Reasons for failure: executive control of the site passed out of technical hands.
The company was taken over by deal-makers, not site-builders.

I tried to log in back in 2003, I think. The server timed out at 40 seconds. The problem wasn't bandwidth - it was a single, expendable feature: a user could crawl deeply into an exponentially expanding tree of friends-of-friends-of-friends... Too many queries.

The people running the company could only yell "make it work." They lacked the technical acumen to make the call: turn that feature off.

As Friendster sputtered, Myspace came along and stole the social net.

Friendster had the right idea, at the right time, the right connections and funding. And they blew it. Merry christmas, zuck :)

An excellent summary of Friendster's collapse is given here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html


Apr 29, 2011

What are the most important lessons entrepreneurs have learned in the first year of their first startup?

Don't push - pull. I mean :

The Push philosophy: Your users/clients are something to be figured out.
Through market research, focus groups - you - in your brilliance - are going to find out what they want before they do, and them herd them towards a new position which you triangulated. It's not where you want to be, but that's OK. You aren't one of the herd. You're a triangulator - a master of the universe.
You're going to cash out, big time.


The Pull philosophy : Build something because you want it yourself. There's a place you want to be. It's so compelling you can't stop yourself -
you need to get there fast. Once there, you want to bring your friends. You hope they bring their friends. Your dream is that a bustling, thriving new community is born and you get to wake up and contribute to it every day. The thought of selling it is painful.

The push philosophy is essentially one of greed and manipulation - the dominant mode of business during the last century.

The pull approach is more humble, more genuine and more productive. Naive - perhaps. But I would stipulate it is the creative force behind facebook, twitter, youtube, quora and many (if not most) of the biggest ideas - and businesses - to emerge over the last decade.


Apr 29, 2011

How can supporters of gay marriage refute "slippery slope" arguments? How, for example, would one respond to the claim that if nothing is wrong with gay marriage, then nothing should be wrong with marriage between two brothers either?

I suppose, assuming for the sake of argument there's a "slippery slope" where eventually a jello mold marries a sea turtle, - it's actually heterosexual marriage which is the first step down the slope.


Apr 29, 2011

How do I behave with arrogant people?

This is a little devious, but it's a good way to get back at them and there really isn't anything they can say about it.

Wait until there is a third person around. Lavish praise on this 3rd person. Point out their brilliance, their intuitive sense of things. When #3 begins to get embarassed, contrast their modesty against their titan abilities.

The arrogant person will often blow a fuse.


Apr 30, 2011

Why is the US so much more prosperous than anywhere in Latin America? Is it simply a matter of the US being settled by European settlers, while Latin America has mixed European and native populations? Why?

This may be oversimplifying a bit, but : In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond asks the larger and older question : Why did great wealth and technology develop in Europe, Asia, and later the US ?

His answer is that these areas lie on the same lattitude, they're all about equally far from the equator. So their climate is very similar. This led to the evolution of "supercrops" like wheat and rice which can feed many more people per acre than any other crop. Also, docile and similarly productive livestock were spread throughout this lattitudinal band.

Once the supercrops had taken hold, they could be transferred to most any other location on that lattitudinal band. So Europe was able, for example, to simply recreate its super productive economic structure in the US.

People living on that band, basically, got a free lunch. This enabled them to do other stuff : export surplus food, raise armies, develop technology. Given this head start, these more advanced societies reinforced their lead through conquest and imperialism.

Take a look at this picture. It's earth at night. That swath of light - and all the development it implies - lies along the same lattitude that the supercrops grow.
(Note the dark blotch of communism.)


Apr 30, 2011

How can Netflix Watch Instantly be made to work on Ubuntu?

I just stumbled across a way to do this which is just a few clicks. It does use Wine - but Wine Is Not an Emulator (recursive acronym), so it doesn't take up space like a virtual machine, require a windows license, or incur the performance hit.

Go here and do what it says :

Netflix Desktop

This guy configured a Wine installation to steer around certain glitches and grab all the pieces you need in one go. Boom - netflix comes up. Awesome.

Much thanks go out to Erich E. Hoover for putting this together.


Apr 30, 2011

Is social media taking over SEO?

Here's an article that asserts that "Inside facebook, NEO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO."

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/07/16/inside-facebook-nfo-is-the-new-seo/


It was written in 2007, well before Facebook overtook Google in page views. Now that we spend much more time looking at our news feed than at search results, it may be time to remove the "Inside facebook" qualifier in the title.

I think the really hard thing for marketers is getting into the news feed in the first place. There's an extra hurdle now.


May 1, 2011

What are the core differences among the approaches of an economist, an exorcist, a scientist, a programmer, a consultant, a chess player and entrepreneur, and a politician/statesman towards problem solving?

I imagine each of these types of people coming upon a new object - like the black monolith in 2001: a space odyssey.

Upon encountering the monolith :

The economist tries to weigh the monolith by measuring its shadow.

The scientist wonders if there is only one (monolithism) or if it's one of many (polylithism). He goes on a search for more monoliths. He never returns.

The consultant explains he is not surprised at all - that, in fact, this is exactly where he expected the monolith to show up. That trees have suddenly evolved. Monolith is the new tree. It's all monoliths now.

The programmer pokes the monolith with a stick in the hopes it reacts somehow.

The chess player tries to build a better monolith.

The politician takes credit for building the monolith.

The exorcist makes a pendant in the likeness of the monolith in the belief that wearing it bestows immortality.

The entrepreneur sells the exorcist's pendants, of course.


May 3, 2011

Why did the US conduct a "Kill / Not Capture" mission for Osama bin Laden, rather than give him a trial?

(EDIT - last answer was too brief.)

Good points here, to which I would add :

It may have been impossible to prove Bin Laden guilty of anything. He was good at dodging surveillance; never admitted to ordering the 9/11 attacks; organized al Qaeda in 'cells' which were semi autonomous. We have OBL bragging on video after the fact, but that isn't proof - he could be stealing credit after-the-fact.

Bin Laden was trained by the CIA to fight in the Mujuhadeen against the Soviets. He probably knew a lot of things about the CIA the US doesn't want made public, or leaked through attorney-client privilege.

This is a little spy-novelly, but there is a remote chance he was taken alive and his 'burial at sea' never happened. The CIA has done weirder. Having Bin Laden as prisoner - and nobody else knowing - may have been an advantageous option.


May 4, 2011

What is "social media" all about?

In 1990, I woke up and read a newspaper.

In 2000, I woke up and read the cnn homepage.

In 2010, I woke up and read facebook.

The difference is that content is now being fed to me by my friends, not a central corporation.

Put another way, now we're all broadcasters.


May 4, 2011

What is your definition of "digital native

A person born in the "digital age", who never knew life without a search engine or email.

Roughly, anyone born in the early 90's in the USA is a true digital native, though the moniker applies well to people below 25 or so (as of this 2011 writing.)

Of course, billions of humans aren't there yet.


May 4, 2011

What are some of the most mind-blowing facts?

Cats with 3 colors are always female. (Rare exceptions are sterile.)

Mindblowing because i grew up around a dozen or so cats and never noticed.


May 6, 2011

If our universe is running on a Turing machine, does free will exist?

Unlike a Turing Machine, the universe is non deterministic due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This is very hard to swallow. Einstein never did.

You might be tempted to say the universe is really deterministic after all, there are just secret mechanisms we haven't uncovered, or it's just a limitation in the way we measure things. Bell's theorem proves this isn't possible.

Technically, Bell proves that either the universe is non deterministic, or there is no "Locality" - that is, we have to do computations involving every particle in the universe to make any sort of prediction, no matter how small.

We do observe locality, though. And we do observe Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle.

So, while the matter isn't completely settled, empirically we seem to faced with a non deterministic universe.


May 6, 2011

What are your best time efficiency hacks?

When pouring a cup of coffee, add the cream and sugar first. Pouring coffee on top takes care of stirring. (Thanks to DD for showing me this.)

When throwing out a plastic bottle, squeeze it smaller and tighten the cap. The vacuum holds - you don't have to empty the recycle bin nearly as often.

For guys : get a shoebox. At nite, put everything you have on you in that shoe box (keys, wallet, glasses, phone.) Never put these items anywhere else. Now you're ready to fly out the door in the morning. (Women solved this long ago with purses. I believe this is why ppl joke that guys can never find stuff and women can.)

[edit] Oh - I should add : Turn facebook chat off. And ... close that Quora tab :)

[yet another edit] The biggest time hack of all, if you live in an urban area, get a motor scooter. In most cities, a motor scooter with an engine 50cc or less is not a motor vehicle, it's legally basically a bicycle. Meaning you can park it on the sidewalk (chain that thing up!). Also, of course, you can slip right through a traffic jam. This can save an hour a day or more.


May 6, 2011

How do you convince a creationist of evolution?

I would offer that to be a believer in God requires one to be humble. And humility doesn't say "I know, because God wrote in this book." Humility says "I don't know if God wrote in this book or not. I don't know anything, really."

If there is a God, there is one book He wrote in for sure : the universe. To study this universe is to seek knowledge of God's creation. And this creation story is stunning and beautiful almost beyond belief.

The book of genesis pales before the Big Bang. The graceful symmetry of the DNA helix - both sculpture and information processor - eclipses the tale of Adam and Eve. The great flood is a minor event compared to the Permian Mass Extinction. Three billion years of life : struggle, cataclysm, survival until finally creatures begin to write, to question, to read the book of the universe.

In humility, we find a much, much more awesome Creator.


May 7, 2011

If one could only watch a single music video, which video would be most profound?

tp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4&feature=relmfu

not technically a music video, but a trailer for the Social Network mashed over a choral version of the song Creep. This speaks to the connectivity and alienation of our age, and annoints a new generation of titans ...


May 7, 2011

In what situations is it OK for a man watching a movie to cry "manly tears" and not look like a big baby?

Only at the death of Chuck Norris.

That is, never.


May 8, 2011

Should I learn Ruby or Python for web development? What are the pros and cons of both, in terms of performance, feature sets, ease of learning, skills desirability at startups, support, obsolescence, etc.?

Without touching off a language jihad, I'd say that if you want to develop web sites in general then you want to master a web framework (UI + database + controller-logic). Ruby on Rails is more popular right now than Python-based frameworks like Django.

See Why is Django not as popular as Ruby on Rails?

I'd go with the most-used framework, because it opens up more job opportunities and makes it easier to get help from others. You'll find more examples and there are more open source contributors fixing and enhancing the code base.

But only for that reason. In terms of capability, Rails and Django are roughly equivalent.

Web frameworks aside, python does shine if you need to write some sort of 'algorithmic duct tape'. It's a very elegant scripting language for doing fancy stuff on the back-end; sort of a much more elegant version of Perl. A web crawler is a half page of code, for example. Its functional-programming heritage (think LISP) fits nicely with problems where you need to crawl, rank, optimise, pattern-match, etc. Its syntax is very, very small—there's very little language to actually learn. Python is often credited as being the 'secret sauce' at companies which need to do extensive calculations on the back-end (like Google).

So my recommendation is learn Ruby on Rails, but on the side pick up a bit of straight Python as an all-purpose scripting and calculation tool.

Again, jihadists, just my opinion. I'm sure reasonable people differ on this. :) (plz don't flame me :) )


May 9, 2011

Startups in 2011: What will be the next big thing after Facebook and Twitter?

Maybe - nothing. This graph from The Enonomist, Feb 20, 1999 might be right. :

We have just been through a period of head-whirling change.

Look at everything that showed up under our christmas tree in fifteen years :

The world wide web. Google. Wikipedia. GPS. Cell phones. Social networking. On-demand movies, music, books. The unviersal ability to broadcast : blogs, youtube.

Look also at all the creative destruction : record stores (i miss those), block buster, Encylopedia Brittanica, travel agents, etc etc.

It may be time to breathe. To just refine this stuff and maybe even reign it in a little.

If i had bet, yeah - i'd say there are probably a couple more big things coming soon. But I wouldn't be shocked if there aren't.

And I'm cool with that. It was quite a christmas morning, after all.


May 9, 2011

What book should be made into a movie?

Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.


May 9, 2011

If one could choose only one thing, what should be changed about Wikipedia? Why?

I think one thing the Wikipedia community does well is handle what I call a Stage I Newbie. Somebody shows up, hasn't read the pillars, doesn't know what consitutes a reliable source, and just starts making mistakes like crazy.

The community is generally friendly and helpful and will guide the person to the policy pages.

Then s/he becomes a Stage II Newbie. The Stage II now understands what a RS is and gets the pillars. This is where things go wrong.

It's not long before the Stage II gets into the (normally spirited and constructive) debate in Talk. S/he is now in a position to be right , at least some of the time.

But they have a low edit count. They don't have lots of Wiki-friends. The opponent in the dispute does. Suddenly, a swarm of the opponent's friends show up. You know, just to "take a look at the article". Now the newbie is arguing with a hydra. Maybe they put a Disputed tag on the page - it gets reverted. "You don't get to do that."

In short, the problem isn't that the community rejects the clueless newbie. The problem is they reject the newbie the moment s/he becomes a capable contributor. The Stage II newbie has a choice - either go away, or join the game. Drive up their edit count, form alliances. The latter isn't of interest to most people, I think.

Suggestion : "Micro arbitration." When there is a debate dragging on like this - and especially when it involves somebody with a low edit count, there's a button they can press to quickly summon an admin. I think it would be important that the Admin is anonymous to the action - their username remains unknown to both parties. (The in-crowd of editors know many admins.) Perhaps the admin can be pulled randomly from a pool of volunteers - who don't necessarily need to be Admins in the true sense.

Details aside, there is a mechanism in place for a 3rd party to quickly resolve the dispute in a non-gameable way, based solely on its merits as already given in the Talk page. Nobody should feel badly about losing the decision. Nobody should hesitate to hit the button, as a learning experience if nothing else. It should be seen as a way to move things along faster.

The mere presence of such a mechanism may do much to inhibit "shoot the newbie" tendencies.


May 9, 2011

Who has deserved a Nobel Prize but did not win one because of the stipulation that the recipient be alive?

Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958.


She took this picture, the first (clear) x-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, 1953 :


This picture gives away the overall structure of the helix (and the symmetry group she reported gives away even more.)

A guy she worked under (with?) named Maurice Wilkins showed this image - without Rosalind's consent - to James Watson who went ahead and built a model of DNA with Francis Crick.

Franklin was a relentless and innovative researcher. After her death her papers revealed that she had herself worked out the overall structure of the DNA molecule. She also had to labor under considerable institutionalized sexism at King's College - there were literally rooms she was not allowed to enter due to her gender.

Had Crick and Watson not beat her to print, she may have single-handedly made what is perhaps the most important discovery of the 20th century. In any case she was a critical part of it.

In 1962, the Nobel Academy acknowledged the importance of the x-ray work by including Wilkins in their award to Watson and Crick.

Franklin had died 4 years earlier.


May 11, 2011

Is it possible that nothing I perceive actually exists?

Descartes addressed this, in his famous pronouncement "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am.)

He observed that we cannot be sure of the existence of anything - except ourselves. For to doubt the existence of something requires a doubter. In other words, the fact that you are wondering about the question itself means that you, yourself exist.

Everything else is fuzzy :)


May 11, 2011

Where is the Fourier sine/cosine series ever used in the real world?

To take a special case of Rob Weir's answer, one of the simplest and most impressive applications of the Fourier series is in musical synthesizers. (See Moog Synthesizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moog_synthesizer and Fourier Synthesizer http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/demomanual/harmonic_motion_and_waves/waves/fourier_analysis_and_synthesis.html).

What's really cool is that it doesn't take too many superimposed sine waves to get close to a real world sound, like a violin string.

There's even an "app for that" : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier-synthesizer/id404166615?mt=8

This can be an engaging way to introduce students to the topic.


May 11, 2011

When are imaginary numbers used in real life? What practical applications do they have?

It is used in modern physics to model the dimension of time :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space
http://www.quantonics.com/Einstein_Minkowski_Space_Time_Diagram.html


May 12, 2011

What is a short, useful, and generally applicable piece of wisdom?

"Never try to out-stubborn a cat." -- Robert A. Heinlein.


May 14, 2011

Is there such a thing as a stupid or a dumb question?


May 16, 2011

Is there any evidence to the contrary that 99.99% of online "businesses" do little beyond provide ways for the shallow masses to waste time and indulge in narcissistic delusions?

We used to live in villages. Within walking distance of our jobs, the market, the town meeting places. We all knew each other's names. 'to call' someone meant you went over and knocked on their door.

We were connected.

Then came industrial society which bulldozed all that. We no longer knew our neighbors, we commuted to work, towns became cities where we walked among strangers. Most people sat home and watched TV for hours.

I don't think people had ever been lonelier. I wouldn't have blamed you for questioning the value of modern technology in 1980.

But social media returns to us what has been stripped away. Dozens of people know how i'm doing today, what i'm interested in, have a chance to meet up with me later for some live music.

We got our village back.

Frivolous? Ask yourself - suppose we solve the problem of peak oil, overpopulation - then what? What was it all for ?

To connect, to live a life engaged with others, to learn, to hear and to be heard.

Why wait ?


May 17, 2011

Why is it possible for Python to be implemented in other languages?

A compiler or interpreter is just a program, which reads data and does complicated things with it.

Every language you'll ever come across - that's actually used to solve real world problems - has a minimal set of features so that it's turing complete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness). This means it can do loops, branches, store data - the basics you'd expect.

The first formally specified turing-complete language was the lambda calculus
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus). Interestingly, it was devised before the electronic computer. Any language can be translated into the lambda calculus. Put another way, every language is a trivial variation of the lambda calculus.

The λ-calculus could be used to make a λ-calculus interpreter (which is an odd thing to do, since you already have one.)
so λ-calculus -- interprets---> λ-calculus .

Since all languages are just variants of the λ-calculus, you can have :

λ-calculus --interprets --> COBOL
λ-calculus --interprets --> Python
λ-calculus --interprets --> C++

and so on. And it works both ways, since all languages are equivalent (technically, isomorphic), they can serve as the interpreter :

COBOL -- interprets --> λ-calculus
Java -- interprets --> Python

etc. Any language can be used to write any other language, since they are at heart the same .

It's interesting to look back on how languages got boot-strapped. All CPUs
can process machine code, so that's the starting point. At MIT in 1962, a LISP interpreter was written in machine code. LISP is a fairly direct adaptation of the λ-calculus. LISP adherents still regard it as elegant and effective (though it did evolve a little.) LISP wasn't really used to bootstrap any further languages. The LISP heritage still prevails at MIT (and influenced Python.)

In 1969, the C programming language was developed at Bell Labs and became the linga franca at Berkeley. While C and LISP are technically equivalent, C is 'closer' to the way the hardware works and LISP is 'closer' to the λ-calculus. C programs are very fast but it's hard to verify that they are correct, LISP is slower but it's easier to review and predict its behavior. C programs tend to be long, LISP tends to be short.

C was very much a bootstrapping language due to its speed. It was used to create C++, Java, and many other languages (and operating systems.)


May 18, 2011

After HTML and CSS, what languages should a hobbyist learn for web development?

I hesitate to answer anything addressed to 'brilliant web people :) But I think most web folks (of both the brilliant and semi-brilliant variety) would agree your next steps are :

JavaScript. This allows your to create more interactive web pages. Especially Ajax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)) which enables you to send and load data without refreshing the page. JQuery is a rich JavaScript library which helps with Ajax and other cool looking stuff.

If you haven't yet, get a local web server running like Apache http://www.apache.org/ and a database like MySql http://www.mysql.com/ .


So with JavaScript running on the browser, and PHP, Apache and MySql on the server (your local machine in this case) you have a complete development environment. As a short-cut for accessing the MySql database, you may want to pick up a simple database tool for PHP like readbeanphp (http://redbeanphp.com/).


May 18, 2011

What are scalable hosting options for Django if we need shell access but don't want to do any setup?

Amazon's EC2 cloud is uber scalable and has a free introductory 'tier' : http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .

Quora runs on it, among many others.


May 18, 2011

Why is the probability of something about which you have no information not 0.5?

It is 0.5, by symmetry.

We don't know anything at all about event A, let P(A) be the probability that it occurs.

We cannot say P(not-A) < P(A), because that implies some knowledge of A.
Similarly we cannot say P(A) < P(not-A).

Thus P(A) = P(not-A). Since P(A) + P(not-A) = 1 for any A, P(A)=P(not-A)=0.5

Ignorance implies symmetry.

However, we have to be careful when we go from A - essentially a closed envelope containing a condition we can't read, to an actual question like "is there an invisible teapot between earth and mars." Once we frame the question a great deal of information has begun to sneak in ...


May 19, 2011

How can one believe in science and religion at the same time?

I think we should let Einstein answer this one :

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. -- A Einstein, from his essay The World As I See It (http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm)

May 20, 2011

How can social media best be explained to a complete novice?

It's a living magazine.

Every reader is also a writer and an editor. It captures, filters and arranges personal information, photos, articles, videos - anything that can be seen or heard.

It comes in different flavors depending on the size of the group and what they choose to focus on.

Facebook is a magazine with a couple hundred reader/writers (in my case) without much focus on any one thing.

The Quora magazine has a much larger group focussed on 'finding things out.''

Youtube is larger still focussed on video.

Traditional magazines like Time are still churning away, but now its articles are clipped out, filtered and distributed through these new social magazines.

The social magazine changes every minute, and you can add to it whenever you want.


May 20, 2011

What are the best arguments against efficient market theory?

Feedback loops. People can start valuing something stupidly - and everyone knows it's stupid - but the mere fact that others are doing it make it rational.

As in, "I know this beany baby isn't worth 50 bucks, but there is a bigger idiot than me willing to pay $100 for it." And there is, it's actually a rational move (until the crash.)

Result: People sell their houses to buy tulips. Endless bubbles and crashes destabilize the economy.

Witness the circuit-breakers built into the stock market by the SEC. This is basically the off-switch to the free market; an open admission that there are times when a feedback loop has rendered the market incapable of determining value.


May 20, 2011

Given a set dataset of (x,y) coordinates, how can I determine the equation of find a line non-linear function that contains all of those coordinatespasses through each point?

This is typically done using a spline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation.


May 21, 2011

Why did Symbian fail, and why couldn’t it attract as a large a developer base as did Android and iOS?

I did some work on the development of Symbian/Qt.

I agree with Horace, except that around 2008 Nokia "got it." They knew that the user experience was king, and went after it with billions of dollars. They couldn't do it.

What happened?

I think it's important to draw a distinction between the OS and the UI layer. The OS provides only the mechanism, you can layer any kind of UI you like on top of it.

For example, you can have a Unix OS with a (Mac) OSX UI layer, or else you can have X-Windows/Gnome (like my laptop.)

Symbian is much more resource-efficient than IOS or Android. And that still matters very much: the iPhone has crappy battery life, cameras suck on phones in general. By consuming less power and memory, space (and money) was opened up for a better camera, for example.

Have a look at the N8, a phone i'm still using.

The hardware was ground-breaking. That's a 12 Megapixel Carl Zeiss camera on the back. Xenon flash. Shoots video in HD.

Symbian's efficiency enabled the hardware engineers to fit that thing in there (well almost, note the bulge ;) And the battery lasts.

Epic hardware. UI - cumbersome. It's just "OK" in a market where OK doesn't cut it. Think windows 3.1. Workable at best.

Nokia tried to get a major carrier on board to release this in the US late last year. The carrier was ready to sign, but first did a simple test: put it on a table next to an android and an iPhone, and let some people in.

The verdict: "No way would I buy this." Result: The 'elopacalypse' - Elop throws in the symbian towel, and opens the gates to Microsoft.

Why couldn't Nokia - with billions to spend - put a decent UI on top of Symbian? Even though they could shift priorities, they couldn't shift the culture. It's an engineering, not a design, culture.

The UI issue, to them, was just another tech issue to be broken down into pieces, solved, and assembled. You just throw a lot of people at it. They built up from what they had:

They had Symbian. They also had a crusty old graphics layer called Avkon. They threw out Avkon, and bought Qt. Qt is a very capable toolshed for making UI's. So far so good.

Next they brought in "design people." Lots and lots of them. Committees generated reams of specs. Armies of programmers set to work.

But the specs kept changing. There was no cohesive vision of what the end-result would be. "Do windows have an 'X' button or a 'Back' button?
Does it leave the process running? I don't know, let's have a conference call on this, spec. item #2074." This sort of thing was going on during development.
A second graphics layer on top of Qt called Orbit was introduced - and then pulled out halfway through.

Like a movie that never gets made because the script is in re-write during production.

Speaking of movies, contrast this to the design approach of Steve Jobs, formerly of Pixar. Apple designs from the top down. It starts with pixel-perfect mockups, a walkthrough of the user experience. They arrive at a single, cohesive vision and hand it over to engineering - "Make this."

Nokia knew that the UI was the most critical part of the system. But on a cultural level, they didn't get that the UI was the purpose of the system, not just a tech problem to be figured out.


May 24, 2011

How does Pixar come up with such awesome ideas for movies?

There's a great documentary which addresses this question and points out these features of pixar :

small, intense, close-knit group with a playful culture.

great stories

willingness to embrace new technology

the Jobs effect


really worth seeing, it's streaming on Netflix : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/


May 26, 2011

Which actors have done the best job playing the role of the President? Who are some of the best fictional American Presidents in cinematic and television history?

Anthony Hopkins nails it in Nixon (won the Golden Globe for it, got robbed at the Oscars.) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113987/

Henry Fonda in Failsafe http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/.

and the greatest of them all,

Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/.
Though he is upstaged a bit by George C Scott and Peter Sellers.


May 27, 2011

What's the best putdown?

from a kid in elementary school :
"Nice shirt. We used to have curtains like that until my father got a job."


May 27, 2011

What are the most profound jokes ever?

How many zen buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?

Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.


May 27, 2011

What are some of the funniest one-liners?

"I've been too fucking busy and vice versa." -- Dorothy Parker.


May 28, 2011

In Back to the Future, why does George McFly punch Biff?

As Jamie said, this is the moment George McFly "becomes". This happens everywhere in literature (and life) ...

The Grinch stands atop the mountain and hears the villagers singing even though he stole all their stuff. He "becomes" and he - yes the grinch, carves the roast beast.

Dorothy hates kansas but finally emerges from her dream, "there's no place like home."

Benjamin realizes, at last, there is one thing that actually matters in a plastic world and pounds on the windows of a church during a wedding, "ELAINE! ELAINE!" He becomes.

As for McFly, his life is driven by anxiety and awkwardness. He has talent but no confidence. He'll never become a writer, he's going to end up Biff's abused underling. (He wouldn't have gotten the girl either, but there was no way to write that.)

Until that moment - his fist rises up and George looks at it as if it's another person entirely - which it is. It's shaking like the legs of a foal taking its first steps, or perhaps from the struggle between old-George and real-George.

Biff's head spins all the way back and he's knocked out cold by the full force of George becoming Mr. McFly, science fiction author and father.


May 29, 2011

What are some good exercises for making a shy, uncertain dog feel more confident and secure?

I've never argued directly against another post before, but the "pack theory" of dogs and the "Alpha leader" notion persists among many animal trainers - it has been thoroughly debunked. (http://k9domain.org/alpha_theory.aspx).

A bit of history, the pack model comes from the study of wolves and the term 'alpha' was largely introduced by L. David Mech. The problem is that the wolves were not being studied in their native setting, unobtrusively, for long enough. The researchers jumped to conclusions.

It turns out that wild wolves are not arranged in dominance hierarchies, but rather simple biological families.

Mech repudiates the pack idea here, http://www.davemech.org/news.html


The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book's info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history.
One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. "Alpha" implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents

So not even wild wolves live in competitive dominance hierarchies, never mind their cousins who were domesticated 50,000 years ago.

So how to comfort your shy pup? I would suggest you speak to an animal trainer who does not ascribe to the pack theory. From my limited experience, I would suggest treating your dog like a child. Socialize it as soon as you can with other children (pups). Try to ensure the experiences are positive (not large or aggressive pups.)

Like any child, s/he is unique. Try to learn its likes, dislikes, and means of expression. Like a good parent, be calmly assertive, forgiving, constant.


May 29, 2011

What are the best movies with shocking/surprising endings? [SPOILERS]

Being There. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/

Spoiler alert : see comments for (spoiler) explanation.


Jun 7, 2011

What is the best "hole in the wall" restaurant in Boston?

Carlos' in Allston : Southern Italian fare, packed with locals every nite. Very casual, inexpensive -

http://www.carloscucinaitaliana.com/


Jun 7, 2011

When my dog goes to eat her food, she moves her head up and down and pushes the plate with her nose unintentionally, what may be the cause of this?

It could be many things, I would approach the problem like a detective.

Something in the dogs environment, perhaps coupled with a memory from her past, may be making her nervous.

I'd suggest getting down on all fours to see things from her point of view. What's it like down there? Are there reflective surfaces around (like a trash can or the bowl itself)? Anything tall lurking a few feet away?

Is the floor cold? Is it tile so that her paws make a noise on it?

Scent is the dog's most acute sense : is the bowl clean? Is it near the garbage?

Does the location feel 'safe' or is it pretty much out in the open?

Is it near something that generates sound, like a refrigerator or an air conditioner?


Jun 7, 2011

Which easy to understand mathematical problems are still unsolved and why?

Goldbach's conjecture is accessible to a high school freshman :

Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes.

"Why" is of course tricky, but there are many open problems concerning prime numbers.


Jun 7, 2011

Which zombies are legit - fast zombies or slow zombies?

I'm going to come at this a little differently.

We start with an undeniable assertion :

The Zombie Apocalypse is coming.

Anyone who disagrees with this will be unprepared for it, and themselves be eaten or zombified. So they're not worth talking to.

Given the ZA is inevitable - we must recognize that while Romero's zombies have more historic legitimacy, being actually dead and such - there is no way they could pull off an apocalypse.

Slow moving zombies can't catch anything. You just walk right past them, as clearly shown in Shaun of the Dead. Poke fun at them if you wish.

The only way slow moving zombies kill anybody is when somebody freaks out and runs screaming, either breaking a heel or running straight into another zombie. Or else they lock themselves up with other people and begin fighting over who's in charge. Whilst zombies walk in the front door.

A slow-moving mass of zombies would be mowed down by teenagers with rakes and camera phones. The only negative effect on society would be that youtube would crash.

No, I'm afraid it'll be fast-moving zombies that will destroy civilization. And nothing is more legitimate than that.


Jun 9, 2011

Why is U2 so popular?

Part of their success can be credited to some innovative 'sonic architecture' (to use Jimmy Page's phrase.) The Edge did a lot of experimentation with reverb, modifying chords, and trying hundreds of different guitars and strings.

Similar to bands like The Beach Boys and Boston : a signature sound emerged which is recognizable in a fraction of a second.


Jun 9, 2011

What are the most defining American movies?

I'll take a stab.

Citizen Kane (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/), sometimes considered the best american movie. This film reflects on our greed, materialism, competitiveness and loss of soul.

The Right Stuff (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/). The story of the Mercury Seven astronauts. A celebration of american hubris, our sense that anything is possible and our disregard for authority.

The Graduate. A privileged young man graduates college and finds upper-middle class life profoundly disappointing and vapid.

American Beauty. Everyone in this movie - everyone - is lost, searching for meaning and beauty in a quiet suburban landscape.

American Graffiti. Called by Ebert a "brilliant piece of historical fiction", it reproduces life in 1962 (pre-vietnam, really what we think of as 'the fifties') so accurately that old timers say it freaks them out. So i'm told :)


Jun 11, 2011

What percentage of work hours go into actual coding at early stage internet startups?

104%.

You're nothing until you launch the prototype.


Jun 12, 2011

Why don't politicians use numbers in their speeches?

I think a lot of it boils down to the 'braininess' of the politician. We have had some presidents with quite prodigious recall like Clinton (his teleprompter malfunctioned during a state of the union address - he simply continued from memory without skipping a beat), JFK, and possibly Obama. These are guys who trust their memories, and are comfortable with analytic thought. They're not going to mess up 'billion' and 'million''.

But they're outliers.

Numbers have on occasion been used to devestating effect. From Martin Luther King,

About a hundred ninety-two negroes, on average, are registered to vote each month in the state of Alabamba. On the basis of this ... rate of registration ... it will take over five hundred years for half the negroes eligible to vote in Alabama to become registered. -- MLK


And

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends five hundred thousand dollars for every enemy soldier killed, and only fifty three dollars annually on the victims of poverty.


But, for MLK too, at his most visceral he avoids numbers,

The bombs in vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America

Jun 13, 2011

Which animals have a brain that is bigger/heavier than a human's?

Suprisingly, Neanderthal had both a bigger brain and a bigger brain-to-body-weight ratio. Where they smarter? Most scientists think not, a minority considers it possible. But there has been a generally accepted revision of the modern view of Neanderthal's intellectual capacity.

Firstly, they looked more like this rather than the guy in the geiko commercial :

They definitely had tools, and probably made this flute :

They also are considered to have had language and religious ceremonies.

Some scientists think that Neanderthal may not have been less intelligent than Homo Sapien, but instead were just unlucky, or perhaps less aggressive.


Jun 13, 2011

Who are some people whose public status was suddenly upgraded from crackpot to prescient guru?

Winston Churchill was marginalized as a washed up crackpot during the 30's for repeatedly warning that Germany was ... acting a little funny ;)


Jun 15, 2011

What's a healthy snack that goes with beer and cheese?

Moderation.


Jun 16, 2011

What is the greatest failure of Western civilization?

Erosion of Leisure time : post industrial people have to spend more time to obtain the necessities of life. It takes more time to simply live. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

Geographic sprawl negated the benefits of cars: Prior to the internal combustion engine, people generally lived within about 20 minutes walking distance of their place of work, shops, and social venues - that is, in a village. As cars and roads were created, we scattered these things out farther so now they are at least 20 minutes away and we need a car and we're burning up fuel like crazy and our cities are choked with cars.

Imperialism : Stronger nations - without a trace of apparent regret - routinely seize the resources of weaker nations, topple their governments, and invade them. This is done under the rubric of "protecting their interests."

Nuclear weapons : As stronger nations came into conflict over control of the world's resources, a nuclear arms race ensued where we actually built enough bombs to zorch the planet 100 times over.

Regimented educational system : We have a school system whose purpose is job training, not the development of the intellect. We take a billion young, inquisitive minds and force them to sit down and listen to some adult talk at them. What do the following people have in common? : Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Woody Allen, James Cameron, The Beatles, Lady Gaga, Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Lloyd Wright. You guessed it - drop-outs. Einstein couldn't get a recommendation to graduate school.

Economic booms and busts : 100's of millions of people routinely end up without the necessities of life for no external reason; the capitalist book-keeping system simply goes haywire, goes into a feedback loop and fails to allocate labor, goods and services successfully.

We cannot walk around on our own planet : Every square inch of land has been sold off, except for a few Reservations (parks) and paved passage-ways on which we are expected to be in transit at all times. Amazing to reflect on, we cannot legally simply walk in any direction we choose.


Jun 16, 2011

What is 2001: A Space Odyssey really trying to say?

My take :

Mankind's evolution is incomplete.

Man, in His current form, is still very much an animal unfit for the higher calling of the cosmos.

We see the apes fighting over the waterhole - though there's plenty of water for all of them and they belong to the same species. Later we see the Americans and Russians still locked in a cold war and ... exporting that cold war to the moon. Even though the earth is plenty big enough and they belong to the same species.

In scene after scene we see the animal nature of man : he is constantly eating.
The mechanics of ingestion is shown in great detail. We also see him going to the bathroom. Aside from that, he's pretty bored. Tanning himself. Playing chess.

Eating, lounging, fighting. He's not much different than his ape ancestors. The single-frame transition from flying bone to spacecraft (often called "The biggest flash-forward in film history") suggests modern man is not different at all. It's just more of the same.

Man is halfway there. He has mastered tools but not himself. He's learned to wield a bone but is still using it to bash his brother's head in. The US and Soviets are ready to blow up the planet.

The book 2010 explains that it was cold war paranoia that led to HAL's breakdown. There was fear the Russians might discover the alien beacon to Jupiter and get there first. To prevent any possibility of a leak, HAL was given orders to lie to the crew about the true purpose of the mission. This conflicted with another mandate HAL was given : assist and inform the crew in every way possible. The result was HAL went murderously bonkers.

The argument over the waterhole never stopped, and created a world filled with secrecy, suspicion, and on the brink of destruction.

In the final scenes, we see Bowman eating yet again. He drops a glass and it shatters. This being is imperfect.

He re-emerges as the star child, free of corporeal constraints - he appears composed of pure energy with no need to eat or fight. The entire earth and everyone on it are eclipsed both literally and metaphorically by this higher form of life which is worthy of the cosmos.

Zarathustra has spoken.


Jun 16, 2011

What are some anachronisms in Super 8?

Strangely, the anachronisms are mostly off by a single year.

The mention of Three Mile Island on TV marks the present time as summer of '79.

A Rubik's cube is mentioned. These were released in 1980.

Joe's bedroom has a Star Wars model from The Empire Strikes Back, also released in 1980.

A Sony Walkman is mentioned. Also released in 1980.

So it may be that there is just one slipup - the TMI mention may be a 'cascading error'.


Jun 17, 2011

How can I extend the "burst of creativity" period that occurs just after waking up?

Take a nap in the afternoon. Then you get to wake up twice per day.


Jun 17, 2011

Why isn't DragonSpeak more popular?

I would hazard that Dragon is 10 years too late. Everyone became really good typists.

Voice recognition took a long, long time to get workably accurate. In the last decade, an older generation relearned how to type and use a mouse. A new crop of digital natives can type like the wind.

Now that Dragon is finally ready, it solves a non-problem.


Jun 18, 2011

What was it like to hear about the Pearl Harbor attacks on Dec. 7, 1941?

Guess :

Surprise, Dismay, and Relief.

Despite the US revisionist description of a "sneak attack"out of the blue, the US was already considering war with Japan and the Axis powers. We were shipping arms and fuel like crazy to Great Britain and halted all exports of oil to Japan, which we knew would drive them to desperate measures.

Isolationism prevailed in the US, after the pointless morass of WW I. But we also recognized that the Axis powers were on one hell of a winning streak; that as a nation with huge resources (especially oil and steel), and one of the victors of WW I, eventually we would be attacked. If we waited until then, we may have to fight both Germany and Japan alone. Great Britian was pleading with us to get into the war.

The US was deeply conflicted. Some wanted to stay out of it, no matter what. We'd defend our shores when the time came. Others wanted to jump in before it came to that. Yet others thought the problem would solve itself - Germany had already attacked our merchant ships. We'd be forced into the war soon enough.

A peacetime draft was instated over a year before Pearl Harbor. Many Americans were just waiting for the other shoe to fall.

It fell on Pearl Harbor - which was not yet American soil, Hawaii was not state.
We didn't think the Japanese could cross that much ocean, nor attack ships in such shallow waters. But - strangely, our most important military assetts, the aircraft carriers, had been moved out of Pearl Harbor virtually unescorted by battleships.

Dismay : We were in the war at last, and knew great sacrifices lay ahead, and some feared we may be conquered.

Relief : At last, we had a clear mandate, a united purpose. No more debate, no more waiting, we were suddenly united.


Jun 21, 2011

Who are relatively well-known actors that are father and son or mother and daughter?

Henry Fonda and Peter Fonda (also Jane).


Jun 21, 2011

What are some common illogical scenes that occur in films? I'm not talking about medical conditions that don't exist or physics-defying stunts, but just common, illogical things that don't really happen in real life.

People walk up to a bar and order "a beer."

When the bad guys drive up alongside the hero and start shooting, the hero never simply slams on the brakes.

In the presence of slow-moving zombies, people run like hell until they fall or lock themselves up in a house. They don't simply walk away.

Nobody just leaves the haunted house.

Cavemen appear in the presence of T-Rex, an anachromism of 60 million years.

A hacker can break into a computer system in 3 seconds, tops.
A car that goes off a cliff always explodes.
People get suffocated/drowned in much less time than a person can easily hold their breath.

Every cigarette lighter in the world is a Zippo.


Jun 21, 2011

Are there any films that show one scene from multiple perspectives?

Vantage Point (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443274/) does nothing but that.


Jun 21, 2011

Did the midseason finale of South Park (Season 15) signal the final season of the show?

Evidence in favor of this being the last season :

Parker and Stone's 3 year contract is up.
Parker and Stone got really pissed that comedy central bleeped the mohammed episode. They are so intolerant of censorship that they lost the character of Chef (Isaac Hayes) rather than tone down their attack on scientology.
Parker and Stone have got to be richer than God at this point, and man - 15 years of anything has to be a drag.


Jun 21, 2011

Why is the award that goes to the comedian who is most likely to show up to Jimmy's ceremony called the "Kathy Griffin Award" on South Park?

Kathy Griffin wanted a Tony award so bad, she entitled her play "Kathy Griffin wants a Tony." So she seems award-happy, or playfully pretending to be (she already has multiple emmies.)


Jun 29, 2011

What are some of the best defensive war tactics in history?

We'd have to include the Parthian shot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_shot). Cavalry archers would retreat, enticing the enemy to give chase.

Synchronized by a horn or some such; the retreating archers would suddenly flip backwards on their horses and send arrows raining down on their pursuers.


Jun 30, 2011

Why do people walk around when talking on their mobile phone?

I think being in motion helps people block out visual information; our eyes tend to land on objects which are stationary. I notice that people who pace like this also tend to look at the floor for apparently the same reason.

To speculate further : people do this in order to imagine being in the other person's presence; an idea which is contradicted by their visual surroundings.


Jul 1, 2011

Is it hubris and a sign of cognitive biases running rampant for adults to believe that they can teach their children in a more effective manner than trained professionals?

I will defer the answer here to a young woman named Erica Goldson, who graduated Valedictorian from high school in 2010. She took to the podium and absolutely devastated the "trained professionals" who put her at the top of the class. The full text and video are here : http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/open-forum/43254-hard-core-truth-about-modern-education-system.html

I will provide a few excerpts :

Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

....
I am graduating ... at the top of my class. I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared.

....
We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so aren't we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation? We are not here to get a degree, to then get a job, so we can consume industry-approved placation after placation. There is more, and more still.

Jul 7, 2011

How do you protect a brilliant idea when founding a startup? Are there any measures you can take to ensure no one steals your idea? Should some things be kept under the radar?

You don't. This is mythology that has its roots in the entertainment industry, and in the by-gone day of mechanical and electrical innovation.

In films that romanticize invention we get this notion that all we have to do is think something up and we are entitled to a life of power and riches. This is a literary device . It makes for a good script because :

The protagonist has an epiphany, a dramatic moment of awakening when the idea comes.

The protagonist then comes up against a nemesis who has stolen their idea.

The whole thing ends up in court, which provides an arena for the conflict to play out amidst great gravitas.

It makes a good movie. And it worked like this in the past, during the mechanical and electronic ages. An idea alone could redirect an industry and could be unambiguously captured in a single diagram.

For example, Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin changed the economics of cotton overnight :

For another, Nicola Tesla's polyphase AC generator made it possible to transmit electricity over hundreds of miles :



Both of these were powerful new ideas that could be legally protected and paid off.

It is not this way in the age of the internet. Because the internet itself is really the underlying invention. At heart, it's a set of interconnections between blobs of data. Sort the blobs and you're Google. Make the blobs personal remarks and you're facebook and twitter. Make the blobs video and you're Youtube. Make them order forms and you're Amazon.

It's all very exciting but it's not novel in the sense of the cotton gin and polyphase current. None of the companies I just mentioned were first. Lawsuits over IP are settled for tiny slices of equity or in cross-licensing agreements.

Your brilliant new blob-connection is too hard to distinguish from all the other blob-connections that exist now and the past.

Admittedly, this new world is brutal to innovators. Facebook can take a look at Twitter and say, "Hmm ... a constant stream of stuff. Let's do that too." Then it can look at Foursquare and say, "Location - let's steal that too."

As other posters have mentioned, the prize doesn't go to the "inventor". It goes to the one who best leverages network effects, who doesn't choke through stages of growth, who can evolve when things get big and as people change.

That's the real movie. A bunch of people working hard, trying, failing, and regrouping to try again. It's not as fun to watch but it's changing the world.

You should talk about your idea to as many people as you can. You never know when that next person will be the angel who drops the critical first round, the partner with a new twist on your idea, or the hacker who keeps your servers up the first night 10,000 people hit your site.


Jul 11, 2011

I have a ridiculously simple idea that would save Netflix a lot of money. Who do I talk to and how do I improve my chances of being financially rewarded?

It is notoriously difficult to get big companies to listen to new ideas. You could create cold fusion using a dixie cup and pez eater, and energy company executives wouldn't return your calls.

I think this is due to a few reasons :

Big companies naturally become risk-averse. Any change at all is just more work, and exposes an executive to risk of making a visible mistake.

Big companies are already very busy with their own stuff and don't have the bandwidth to even consider new things.

Not Invented Here : "We're big cuz we're more awesome at this than anybody. Anybody outside this organization is by definition not as awesome, so their ideas can't be."

To cut through this, I would suggest contacting the CEO directly. S/he's the one who really has the company's best interest in mind and isn't afraid to rock the boat. Make your pitch very, very short because they are busy. Work out beforehand how you want to be involved/compensated. You of course risk them stealing your idea but them's the breaks.

Good luck!


Jul 12, 2011

What is the oldest link on the web?

Symbolics.com was the first domain ever registered in 1985.


Jul 12, 2011

What is the oldest domain on the web?

Symbolics.com (1985)


Jul 19, 2011

Is there any hard evidence that humans are not from this planet?

I don't think so (would we recognize hard evidence if we found it? What would it look like?) The alien-descent theorists do have some interesting circumstantial evidence, or at least some good questions.

It is almost universal in human mythologies - across cultures and millennia - that beings descend from the sky. When you reflect on it, that's kind of a weird thing to make up.

The ancients constructed enormous 'images' that are only visible from the air.
This was build in Peru around 500 BC. It was only discovered in modern times when a plane happened to go over it. Why would ancient people build something none of them would ever see ?


Jul 19, 2011

What are the most common and predictable cliché lines used in TV and movies?

"I'm gettin' too old for this sh!t" -- always spoken by a veteran cop


Jul 19, 2011

In movies or any TV series, if a person tries to search for something on the internet, why do they never use Google, just some unknown search engine?

They need to "hack" it in order to populate it with faux search results that move the plot along. So there are legal issues up the wazoo, similar to using CNN's banner below a false news broadcast….


Jul 22, 2011

Did J.P. Morgan withdraw backing for Tesla's wireless power transmitter experiment because he was convinced that Tesla would make it available for free, and he wanted an energy source he could financially control?

Yes.

My great great grandfather was a man by the name of Leonard E. Curtis. Curtis was Tesla's friend (to the extent that Tesla had normal friendships), helped Tesla secure funding and acted as his patent attorney during the "Current Wars."

In Curtis' memoirs (of which my family has about a dozen copies), he relates :

Curtis was a partner at he Colorado Springs Power Station and they invited Tesla to come out and conduct research. Offered him free power, arranged funding from such sources as JP Morgan. Tesla accepted the offer.

Tesla immediately began building one helluva big tesla coil in the hopes of transmitting electric power through the air. The result was actually comical -

Within a few seconds mini lightening bolts are seen at the tower. A few small fires are ignited around town as wire fences and such aquire electric charge. Then one or more generators explode at the power plant, plunging the town into darkness.

They had to hustle Tesla out on a train to prevent the towns people from kicking his ass (there was still a lot of Old West in Colorado in those days. He did return and fortunately was expert in generator repair.)

News of the incident travelled quickly through the power industry and its investors, and JP Morgan got word Tesla knocked out a revenue-generating power system in an effort to create a non revenue-generating one - that is, broadcast through the air. JPM also got word that Tesla had hopes to illuminate the atmosphere at night, possibly over the whole world.

So Morgan concluded that Tesla was brilliant but reckless and out of touch with financial reality.


Jul 22, 2011

Do Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook employees have a "skeleton key" granting them access to every member's Facebook profile page and information?

In the early days, there was a backdoor password into any account which was a variant on "Chuck Norris."


Jul 23, 2011

What are some of the best Homer Simpson quotes?

Suprised to learn a new friend of his is gay, even tho a little straight-acting.

"I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaaaaaaaming ...''


Jul 25, 2011

What are some of the best dialogue scenes (or monologues) of all time?

Another from The Dark Knight. A lawyer for Batman has uncovered his secret identity, and threatens to expose him unless he gets $10M a year for life.

Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands.

And your plan is to blackmail this person!?

Jul 27, 2011

I'm 26 and I am unemployed. I go out to eat with my grandparents about once a week. Should I feel bad when they pick up the check, time and again? Should I at least offer to pay?

I think there's a simple answer. You shouldn't feel bad because you can't help being unemployed right now (I assume).

I would say, "Thanx for lunch. I can't wait to be working so I can treat."

And when you do get hired, intercept that check before the waiter puts it down.
Cuz yea, they're on a fixed income :)


Jul 29, 2011

What is the most creative example of music used to present science and scientists?

Some kids made a pretty good rap about the Large Hadron Collider :


Aug 4, 2011

From the idea behind the book “What If”, what is the smallest amount of believable change in historic facts or events that would have had the greatest impact on the world as we know it today?

The germans were first to split the atom in 1938.

Had the nazis recognized the potential of this development, delayed the war and put all their resources into development of the atomic bomb, it's easy to imagine that :

In 1943 the nazis are the sole possessors of nuclear weapons. Ten kiloton atomic bombs are dropped simultaneously on Birmingham, Lyons, Stalingrad, and Lodz.

More bombs follow and within a week the UK, France, Poland and Soviet Union have surrendered.

Within the next week the remaining European governments surrender without need of further bombing. The rest of the world soon follows.

You look down at your left arm, and there is a number tattooed there indicating your serial number as property of the Third Reich.


Aug 4, 2011

What are the funniest Google auto-completes?


Aug 4, 2011

Why do humans find things funny?

"Humor is the sudden apprehension of incongruity" -- CS Lewis


Aug 5, 2011

Why do we show our teeth when we smile? I thought in the animal kingdom showing your teeth was a sign of aggression?

According to the book The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, the baring of teeth in simians is a fear response. It is the exact opposite of the aggressive response, where the facial features push forward (furrowed brow, dropped head, chin and lips pushed forward.) In the fear-smile, the features all pull back, head up, brow back, chin and lips back, teeth showing. As if the face is going to extremes not to appear aggressive.

In humans and perhaps other simians, the fear-response evolved into a voluntary expression of friendliness.


Aug 6, 2011

"Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer" -- what does that even mean, though?

Fourteen racoons.


Aug 11, 2011

What are the worst advertisements ever?


Aug 15, 2011

What's the fastest way to make a situation awkward?

Leap from your chair mid conversation and exclaim "IT'S IN REVELATIONS, PEOPLE!!!"


Aug 16, 2011

What horror movie got the most bang for its buck?

Paranormal Activity earned almost $200M on an investment of only $15K.

This film had the benefit of posing as "found footage" where the audience doesn't even expect clean editing. It also had some good acting and viral marketing.


Aug 16, 2011

Why do some people say they listen to every kind of music, except country?

I think the answer lies in a deep cultural rift in the US : red states versus blue states.

Red states are perceived as working-class, white, church-going, somewhat poorer, conservative.

Blue states are perceived as urban, secular, ethnically mixed, liberal.

The identification within each group is a very strong one, and people don't want their friends to see any evidence that you're secretly defecting.

So people who listen to techno/rap/pop etc wouldn't be caught dead listening to country. And vice versa. A country music fan typically gets visibly disgusted at the sound of hip hop.

It's not really the music itself per se, it's that music is serving as the banner of two conflicting subcultures in america.


Aug 16, 2011

What are the best quotations about New York City?

"New York is the dirtiest, largest, ugliest, broken-down city in the world-but it's the only one." -- Isaac Stern

"Every time I leave New York City I am amazed at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough." -- Dorothy Parker

"The city of right angles and tough, damaged people." -- Pete Hamill


Aug 16, 2011

Is wireless power/energy transmission a real possibility?

Sure. You can see a demonstration of it at the Boston Museum of Science.

A large Tesla coil sits in the center of the room. A semi-evacuated tube will begin to glow brightly some 30-40 feet away.

Tesla had his whole lab equipped with such wireless bulbs.


Aug 16, 2011

Why do straight girls tell each other "You look so pretty", even though straight guys almost never compliment each other about being handsome?

To quote Austin Powers (as we all should, frequently),

"That's not something a dude .... should say ... to another dude."


Aug 16, 2011

Why are so many computer engineers also photographers?

Perhaps computer engineers are visual thinkers.


Aug 17, 2011

What advantages does an alternating current have over a direct current?

Alternating current doesn't lose (much) energy to heat over large distances.

With direct current, electrons are being pushed through the wire at a the rate of a few inches an hour. This causes them to collide with other atoms on the way, giving up some energy in the process. The wire heats up.

With AC current, the electrons are vibrating so there is no net translation in space.

AC current can be stepped up to a higher voltage (and lower amperage.)

Using transformers, volts can be exchanged for amps and vice versa. It's the amps that causes the loss due to heat. When electricity is transmitted over long distances, it is "stepped up" to a high voltage to minimize the amperage. This is why you see those high voltage power transmission lines.

As the lines get closer to your house, it is stepped down to 120 V at higher amps. Given the short distances, the heat loss isn't a big hit.


Aug 17, 2011

I read recently about Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, a husband & wife who wrote a series of popular crime novels in the evenings after their children were in bed. What are some interesting true stories about the writing of famous books?

The second most popular author in the world, Stieg Larson, wrote a series of three books in his spare time after work. He made no attempts to publish them until all three were complete in 2004. At which time he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 50.

So one of the world's most popular authors never sold a copy in his lifetime.

His first book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is being made into a movie in the US with a blockbuster budget of $100 M. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/) Coming out right before the holidays.


Aug 18, 2011

What is the perfect crime?

The Perfect Crime : Find a pair of conjoined twins. Have one of them commit a crime while forcing the other to go along at gunpoint.

There is no way they can incarcerate the guilty one because you can't throw an innocent person in jail.


Aug 18, 2011

Why did voters give the Republicans more power in the Senate just 2 years after voting for Barack Obama?

This almost always happens, the effect is called "swing back." It's the opposite of "coat-tailing", where the winning party (for president) tends to pick up extra seats during the presidential election.

In the next two years, some of these "coat-tailers" - who probably wouldn't have been elected had the presidential vote gone differently - turn out to be weak legislators and campaigners. In years where bad stuff happens like military fiascos or economic meltdowns the effect can be sharp, as happened in 2010, 1994 and 1974.

A side effect of this is new presidents usually try to get their most important agenda accomplished during the first two years, in fact - in the first 100 days.


Aug 19, 2011

Why do we have to be 21 to legally drink alcohol in the US?

Danielle Maurer + Chris Knox = the full and definitive answer.

It's very important to include Chris Knox's grasp of the zeitgeist of 1984. (Note irony of year.)
I remember this very well because that law took effect August 1st, 1984. I don't have to look it up because that was my EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY. The law grandfathered legal drinkers in, so that somebody born a day earlier could drink legally. Literally, bars had this sign up, you had to be born *before* Aug 1, 1966 in order to drink. The day I was born. Goddammit.

The MADD thing was a pop culture phenomenom. You couldn't get away from the TV ads and the bumper stickers. There was also SADD (Student's Against ...) which purported to be a student based version, but was really the same organization recruiting young people. I went to one at my school and quickly realized that adults were running the show.

Like any organization with a political agenda, their real purpose was to grow and enforce that agenda. Politicians who opposed them were answered with gruesome posters of car accidents.

They got their way.

I had two objections then, and I still have them now :

1) If the problem is drunk driving, not just drinking - aim the legislation at the real crime. For people under 21, caught driving with a BAC above 0.00, mandatory sentence of 5 year license revocation, 400 hours of community service, $5,000 fine, seizure of car. These kids would walk/stumble home. They're not stupid.

2) Federal law allows for 18 year olds to be conscripted involuntarily and handed a loaded *machine gun*. If we have reservations about their judgement and impulse control there is no way we can justify this. Also, some of these kids will die in the defense of freedoms which they themselves are not entitled to in full.

The US military strongly resists this hypocrisy. The legal drinking age for soldiers outside our borders, or within 50 miles of either Mexico or Canada is 18.


Aug 22, 2011

What do I do if I can't afford the cost of having a girlfriend who wants me to take her out to dinner once a week?

Check out Groupon and LivingSocial. They often have 2-for-1 coupons for good restaurants if you're in a fairly urban area.


Aug 22, 2011

How did ENIAC's early flip-flop circuits work?

The ENIAC's (high speed) flip-flops used two tubes (triodes) coupled together.
(Actually, it used twin triodes housed in the same bulb.)

It's the same principle as making a flip-flop with transistors :


Tubes and transistors are often thought of as amplifiers, but also can be thought of as simply a switch.

In the diagram above, they are coupled together so that if one is 'on', it keeps the other 'off' and vice-versa.

It may also be instructive to consider how a flip-flop may be build with mechanical relays, the same 'mutually enforcing' principle is in effect :


Aug 22, 2011

What are some examples of egoism disguised as altruism?


Aug 23, 2011

What should I do if my girlfriend wants me to stop wearing some boxers that my ex-girlfriend gave me?

This is a matter of principle. Nobody has a right to ask you to throw out a part of your past. Your girlfriend's insecurities are her problem, not yours.

There is a word for people who adhere to such principles : Single.

Toss the boxers dude.


Aug 23, 2011

What are some of the best inspiring, motivating speeches?

Martin Luther King's 1968 "I've been to the mountain top" is, in my opinion, the most stunningly heroic speech made by the greatest american who ever lived.

In this speech, MLK makes it clear that he knows he is going to be assassinated.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. [...] But it doesn't matter with me now. [...] And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.


It would have been easy for him to cancel his activities and simply get to a secure location for a while. He chooses death instead. A bullet may silence him, but he will not be silenced by fear. Towards the end his voice rises,


And I'm happy, tonight! I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!


The next day he lay dead in Memphis.


Aug 26, 2011

Will there ever be a day where electricity is so taken for granted that a power outage will be as inconceivable as losing one's gravitational pull to earth?

A great many blackouts are deliberate, especially during powerful storms. This is done to prevent fires and electrocutions due to downed power lines ...


Aug 26, 2011

What film contains the best car chase?

The ultimate chase scene is probably Quinton Tarantino's Death Proof.

Tarantino deliberately set out to make the best chase scene ever made, without cheating with any CGI.


Sep 1, 2011

What are the best movie speeches?

All of the other speeches mentioned here are good, but there is one and only one best ever movie speech. It is the best movie speech, will always be the best movie speech; there is no possibility of rational debate on this subject. (A few answers have alluded to the film but not explicitly this speech : )

The speech in the movie Network http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/ where a TV anchor goes bonkers(?) and tells everybody to turn their TV's off. He savages the media in all its vacuous banality :

“There is a whole generation of Americans for whom the only truth they know they get through the tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents. This tube is the most awesome force in the universe . . . Who knows what shit will be peddled for the truth?

So you listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is an amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to yourselves because that’s the only place you are going to find any real truth.\

You are never going to get any truth from us. We will tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We will tell you that Kojack always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunkers house and don’t worry how much trouble the hero is in, just look at your watch. At the end of the hour he is going to win. We will tell you any shit you want to hear.

Illusions–none of it is true, but you sit there day after day. It doesn’t matter what color, what creed. You are beginning to believe the illusions. You are beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We on TV are the illusion.

So, turn off your television. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking right now, turn them off.



Sep 7, 2011

Do mosquitos prefer feet and ankles to legs? If so, why?

There is recent evidence that at least some mosquitoes are attracted to the smell of human feet. Who knows whether it's fungus, bacteria or something else.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=malaria-mosquitoes-follow-foot-smel-11-05-11

Would be an interesting experiment to try super-washing your feets next you're out at dusk ...


Sep 7, 2011

What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing, and what do we think we might see?

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us - there is a tingling of the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the deepest of mysteries.” -- Carl Sagan

Sep 8, 2011

What can I do to get along with my teenage classmates without drinking?

They're just trying to push you around. Don't fall for it.

Secretly, they probably admire your backbone. And girls like guys with self control and backbone :)


Sep 8, 2011

What are the long term effects of being a victim of bullying?

Sometimes, this :


Sep 8, 2011

Star Trek (creative franchise): What are some cultural faux pas when working at Starfleet?

Getting a klingon drunk.

Going for cheap laughs by leaving a stuffed Tribble on the bridge or pleading with Spock to "pull your finger."

Bringing up the Prime Directive.


Sep 8, 2011

What are some cultural faux pas at the North Pole?

Giving directions of the form : "Just head South for X miles ..."


Sep 9, 2011

What were the details of Tesla's wireless power transfer demoed in 1888?

I don't think Tesla demoed wireless power transmission in 1888; rather - he unveiled his polyphase current, motor and generator.

His wireless power transmission was demoed in 1891. The underlying principle
is similar to that of radio, a big tesla coil acts as the transmitter :


This transmitter is set to oscillate at very high voltage and high frequency. Like, really high voltage :


In its simplest form, the receiver was another, smaller tesla coil "tuned" to the same frequency. Again, just like modern radio. Electricty is transmitted in the form of magnetic waves.

Tesla had lots of variations on this idea like using the earth's crust to put it in 'resonance' and act as a carrier. He also discovered that partially evacuated glass tubes, without any circuitry at all, will glow in the presence of such a transmitter. (You can see this demoed at the Boston Museum of Science.) He rigged up his lab with such tubes, so he had lights he could put anywhere without wires. Tesla also had this notion of "Electrostatic Transmission" and a lot of fairly weird ideas, understandable because Tesla was pioneering in uncharted ground.

Here's tesla's patents for wireless transmission : http://ip.com/patent/US1119732 Some of it is a little hard to understand, again because Tesla was pioneering this stuff.


Sep 9, 2011

What are the best arguments for not voting?

That you made a considered decision not to vote, that is, to abstain.

Legislators abstain from votes all the time. There is no stigma attached to it.

Reasons for abstaining from an election may be : you didn't become informed of the issues and candidates in time, you see no real difference between them, you have a fundamental objection to the current form of government.

I would go so far as to say this : If, on election day, you do not have a preference grounded in careful consideration of the issues and candidates - you have an obligation NOT to vote.


Sep 12, 2011

Is the combined power of all the nuclear weapons in the world enough to make the Earth explode?

Not even close, this planet can take a helluva whallop.

65 million years ago an asteroid collided with earth, forming the Chicxulub Crater (180 km wide) :

The energy released was equivalent to 100 teratons of TNT.
This is equivalent to 2 million explosions of the Tsar Bomba (50 Megatons - the largest bomb ever detonated.)

This event may have caused Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, but the
earth held together and life recovered.

Tough planet.


Sep 12, 2011

Which movies have the best opening credits?

cheating a bit, but Raising Arizona (1987).
The actual credits don't appear until 10 minutes into the movie, after all the crazy, misguided characters have been introduced and their colliding plot lines set in motion. In a way, the opening credits is 10 minutes long.

Really worth the wait. "Y'all without sin, cast the first stone ..."


Sep 14, 2011

What are some good South Park quotes?

"Now, listen! Why is it that everything today has involved things either going in or coming out of my ass?!" -Eric Cartman, Episode 1

"He looks like somebody tried to put out a forest fire ... with a screw driver."

"I'm not your friend, buddy." "I'm not your buddy, pal." "I'm not your pal, friend" ...

"In Japan, we can not achieve much, with so small penis ..."

"That? That was ... a pidgeon." Officer Barbrady in response to a bunch of black army helicopters going.

And my all time favorite : "Perhaps Mother Nature is best left to her simple, one-assed schematics."


Sep 14, 2011

How do Scientologists feel about the South Park episode on the Church of Scientology?

One scientologist - (the late) Isaac Hayes (Chef) quit the show because of that episode.

There is good evidence that Tom Cruise strong-armed Comedy Central into not rebroadcasting Trapped In The Closet on March 15, 2006. Comedy Central is owned by ViaCom which also owns Paramount Pictures. Cruise allegedly threatened to refuse to any promotional touring for Paramount's Mission Impossible III if they reran the show. This has been called "Closet-gate."


Sep 15, 2011

What is the intellectual legacy of John Nash?

John Nash is best known for two things, which are very different in character.

First, he defined the Nash Equilibrium, which made the nascent field of game theory robust enough for such real world subjects as economics and military strategy.

Prior to the Nash Equilibrium, John Von Neumann basically created game theory and dealt in mostly zero-sum, 2-person games. That is, two players are directly opposed to each other's interest; whatever is gained by one is taken in equal measure from another (like two people playing poker.) Neumann found techniques to calculate solutions (best strategies) for such scenarios.

But the two-person zero-sum game is pretty rare in fields like economics. Usually there are N players and there is not a fixed set of "payoffs." For example, three software companies may be competing to create music players for computers. By cooperating on, say, the file format of music - they can increase the total pool of customers they are competing for. Or, two companies may collude to drive a 3rd out of business. There is a mix of competition and cooperation and a changing total payoff.

The Nash Equilibrium gave a mathematical definition to the notion of a winning strategy in these more complex scenarios. It's very simple: A best strategy is one from which a player has no incentive to deviate, even if he knows all the other player's strategies. That is, it's stable.

As simple as F=ma and as fundamental. Nash joked that "I've won the Nobel Prize for my most trivial work." The Nash Equilibrium became ubiquitous in economic theory.

As they say, once - you're lucky. Twice - you're good. Nash's second big achievement was not simple; it was an act of almost superhuman mathematical virtuosity. Nash solved an open problem in mathematics, the embedding theorem.

The embedding theorem states that "that every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem).

This result was counterintuitive. Most mathematicians wouldn't have believed it, much less tried to prove it. Nash's proof has been described as a "bunch of weird inequalities" that somehow come together to produce this startling result.

Nash's son, also a mathematician (and also schizophrenic) would identify his father as the one who "solved the embedding problem" without mention of the Nash Equilibrium, presumably because the latter is so simple and obvious to professional mathematicians.


Sep 15, 2011

About halfway through the story in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, why does Will suddenly become conservative and nervous regarding moving forward on human testing of 113?

I think it's strictly a plot device. Will's father's relapse alone wouldn't motivate such a reaction. Even a temporary remission from Alzheimer's would be a huge step forward and the most promising area for future research.

But in the movie, Will's the good guy and his boss Dave is the bad guy. The virus does a good thing - make apes smart, and a bad thing - wipe out the human species.

This plot device - Will's sudden turnaround - gives credit to Will for the good part and places blame on David for the bad part.

If we had only listened to Will, we'd have smart apes and no viral apocalypse.

But along came David. Maniacs! You blew it all to hell! :)


Sep 16, 2011

What are some (unknown) anecdotes about scientists?

Einstein famously responded to the Uncertainty Principle with the quip, "God does not play dice." Most people haven't heard the response by Niels Bohr,

"Stop telling God what to do."


Sep 16, 2011

Does Network have any relevance to social media?

I think social media is a vindication of Network's central premise :

Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything
that didn't come out of this tube.

This tube is the gospel,
the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents,
popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world.
...
So, you listen to me. Listen to me!

Television is not the truth.
Television's a goddamn amusement park.
Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers,
dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
...
So if you want the Truth ...

Go to yourselves! ...
In God's name, you people are the real thing.
We are the illusion!

Sep 17, 2011

What are some simple concepts that would be good for most people to understand, but they don't?

Non-Verbal Communication and Body Language.

Desmond Morris studied human body language extensively in his book, The Naked Ape. His treatment of the subject is not exactly scientifically rigorous, but many of his observations ring true.

A woman, when she finds herself in the presence of a man she considers attractive, will almost always touch her hair, in a quick, primal grooming gesture. Watch next time you're clubbing. It's true.

A man will do something similar when he is trying to show deference to another, more dominate male. For instance, a guy explaining himself to the cops is likely to brush back his hair, palm down. Note - many cops shave their heads entirely.

A man's face flushes red in response to fear. When the face goes white (which is rare), he has entered a dangerously aggressive state (get away from such a person, quickly). This is the origin of the phrase "white rage." Blood has been transferred to the limbs in preparation for attack.

A liar won't avert his gaze, contrary to popular belief. People typically look away when trying to access a memory. A liar tends to maintain gaze with the questioner, to judge their reactions.

The 'boss' (male) in a given situation will assert his stature by assuming an exceedingly casual posture. Arms, legs spread apart. Sometimes under-dressed, he is broadcasting that he has nothing to fear and nobody to impress.


Sep 19, 2011

What if the Israelis had "gone nuclear" during the Yom Kippur war?

Most likely a limited nuclear exchange, possibly escalating to WWIII.

Syria and Egypt had the strong material backing of the USSR. Everyone knew the Soviets were providing arms, but neither Mossad nor CIA realized how extensive and sophisticated the support actually was.

Egypt had executed a brilliant bit of PR subterfuge; one year earlier they pretended to have a falling-out with the Soviets. Egypt's complaint was that the Soviets weren't providing enough weapons, and expelled 30,000 Soviet 'advisors' over the issue. It was all a ruse.

The ruse worked; the USA and Israel had dropped their guard.

These tactics are described in the book, The Six Hour War According to a Military Correspondent's Diary, by Abd al-Satar al-Tawila (military correspondent for Rose-al-Yusuf).

The point is Egypt was about as important to the USSR as Israel was to the US.
To turn the tables : Imagine Egypt had a few nukes, Israel had none. Egypt nukes Tel Aviv. The US - without hesitation - would have retaliated against Egypt. The most likely response would be one of 'parity', exact same size bomb, dropped over a similarly populated area.

And this is what we could have expected the Soviets to do: respond in equal measure and nuke Israel.

There is a chance the conflict would end here, at 'parity'. The superpowers would hold emergency negotiations with an eye to swiftly ending the conflict as this war is not in their interest.

However, a number of things could go wrong : Had the Soviets hit back with anything more than 'parity', the US might have launched a massive attack against the Soviets. Or, if after a 'parity' exchange, Israel futher attacked Egypt or even the Soviet Union, the Soviets would hit back massively and the US would again attack the USSR with everything they had.

There is also some risk of simple malfunctions and misunderstandings as a result of the EM-pulse knocking out communication and blinding warning systems that could lead to escalation.

One thing was certain : The Egyptians were on course to invade Israel, and Israel was planning to nuke Egypt when they did. The US wanted to avoid that at all costs.

This was almost the entire motivation behind Kissinger and Nixon's decision to airlift massive arms to Israel.


Sep 20, 2011

What are the most controversial TV series of all time, and why?

Saturday Night Live (does that qualify as a series?)

This nation has had more than its share of great moments. The Wright Brothers first flight. VE day. The moon launch. And the older among us will never forget when, in the mid seventies, on live television, Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtain sat at a news desk engaged in a political debate. Jane presented her case in a factual, well reasoned, articulate way. When she had finished, Akroyd simply turned to her and said,

"Jane, you ignorant slut."


Sep 20, 2011

What are the most goosebump-inducing, awesome, epic movie moments? If such movie moments were a drug, and you were jonesing for that fix, which ones might you watch?

Hard to top Charge of the Rohirrim, but here's a few that come to mind :

The grand daddy of them all, none other than the Dawn of Man from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 movie). Our ape-like ancestor has just had an encounter with an alien artifact, a black monolith. The monolith either increased his intelligence or planted ideas in his head.

He gets by foraging for nuts and berries. His hands have evolved to grip tree branches - not a very useful trait on the ground. He's a rather timid herbivore in the midst of fearsome predators. He'll probably go extinct.

But then he sees a bone on the ground. He thinks. He thinks some more. He grasps it. The first tool and weapon in hand, he has seized the destiny of Mankind :


In Race for the Double Helix (BBC, 1987), Watson and Crick discover the structure of DNA. Crick describes the beauty and simplicity of the "secret of life" as the camera lovingly circles its graceful symmetry :

From 4:45 to 7:50 (don't bail before 6:45, the true climax) :


Sep 21, 2011

How do you make sure you're not Truman from the Truman Show?

You've seen The Truman Show.

A movie like that would never be shown inside the Truman Show, lest it lead to the main character asking questions like ... yours.


Sep 27, 2011

What is the best way to meet new people?

I stumbled upon something that works astonishingly well.

Get yourself a really cool scooter. Like this :


Everywhere you go, strangers will ask you about it.


Sep 28, 2011

What are some of the best quotations about how to live your life?

a) If you had one month to live, what would you do ?

b) What are you waiting for ?


Oct 1, 2011

What are some common misconceptions that we have learned?

High octane gas is better : (delivers more power, burns cleaner, etc.)

This is perhaps the most successful marketing scam ever; it exploits some confusion about high performance engines.

High octane gas is harder to ignite. It takes more heat to make it go bang.

The spark plug creates temperatures hot enough to ignite anything, so high octane burns fine in a normal car. Not better, not worse, just the same.

So why does high octane exist? It's about the moments before the spark plug fires. High performance engines compress the fuel/air mix to such high temperatures that it can ignite prematurely. This is called "engine knocking." Engines with a high compression ratio require high octane gas. Other engines don't benefit at all from it.

High octane gas got associated with high performance, and people got the idea they can improve performance by putting premium gas in their car.

Here's a Scientific American article on it :

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-premium-g

So leave the 93 pump alone, and use the savings to buy some coffee - which has been shown to improve performance :)

Europeans thought the earth was flat when Columbus sailed for India (and hit the New World instead.)

I don't know this piece of folklore made it into history textbooks in the USA. Europeans had known for centuries that the earth was round and in fact knew its circumference to be ~25,000 miles at the equator (as did the ancient greeks).

Columbus somehow got it into his head that it was much shorter.

Many people correctly warned Columbus that this trip was way too long for his supplies and he and his crew would starve on the way. Which they almost did until they got lucky and stumbled on the New World instead.

Here are some sources :

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/1997Russell.html

The "Flat Earth Myth" apparently got its start in 1838, with this erroneous account : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbus


Oct 4, 2011

What novels have the best closing lines and paragraphs?

The last thing the late Robertson Davies ever wrote. He was old, near death, and seems to have known it. The last paragraph of his last book, The Cunning Man , is a very poignant goodbye :

“This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.”

Oct 6, 2011

How different would Apple have been today if Steve Jobs had not rejoined the company in 1997?

Gone. An historical footnote. Nobody under 30 would recognize their logo.

In the mid nineties Apple had completely lost its focus. Too many product lines of yawn-inducing beige hardware, completely ineffective marketing. Their products were sold mainly in Sears where staff didn't have the training to keep the demo models working, much less answer consumer questions. Apple didn't even manage to negotiate prominent displays for them. Apple was also licensing its OS to other manufacturers, giving up control over the quality of the end-product.


And Apple had run out of cash. Out of desperation the board of directors brought Steve back.

Jobs regained control of manufacturing. He somehow managed a $150M investment out of Microsoft (I never did figure that one out) to keep the company afloat. He slashed product lines. He refocussed the company on making one great product : the iMac. He made bold simplifications. The floppy drive - gone, deprecated by the internet.

I remember walking into a Sears in 1998. A table featured 4 iMacs in various bright colors. People couldn't stay away. You had to walk over and check it out. As you approached, you noticed it had a handle on top. You could just grab this thing and walk down the street with it.

Did looks really matter that much? You bet your ass they did.

Jobs was back and you could see it.

Apple never lost money again. After over a decade of bold and relentless innovation, Apple's market cap overtook the giant that threw them a bone in '97.


Oct 6, 2011

In the Republican debate in Dartmouth on October 11th, 2011, what were some good questions that should have been asked of the candidates?

At the risk of oversimplifying:

How did we get into this mess?
How do we get out?
How do we prevent it in the future?


Oct 8, 2011

Did Steve Jobs hate Bill Gates? What happened when two of the biggest names in the field of technology met?

I expect there was deep, smoldering resentment between the two.

Jobs certainly felt ripped off by Gates when Microsoft released windows. Gates' retort that Apple and Microsoft both stole the GUI from Xerox doesn't hold up :
Jobs had paid Xerox to get a look at it. Jobs then went off and perfected it with his usual ... perfection. Gates outright stole it - using a prototype Apple entrusted him with as a head start - and Apple floundered for years in a niche market.

I don't think a meglomaniac like Jobs ever gets over that.

Gates, on the other hand, won the game but was denied the public accolade. That word so often used inside Microsoft - Innovation - was rarely invoked by others. A movie portrayed him as a cunning copy-cat. A federal judge publically declared that Microsoft made crappy software which damaged consumers. Gates had won the trophy but not the respect it should have carried.

I don't think a meglomaniac like Gates ever gets over that.


Oct 9, 2011

What is the difference between a smartphone and a tablet?

I think the essential difference is :

A smartphone is designed to be used in the hand and fit comfortably in your pocket. It's always on you. This demands low weight, high durability, small size, long battery life, an interface that's usable with a single thumb - the primary mode of interaction.

A tablet is designed to sit on the table or lap, to be carried in a case (or backpack etc.) Having it with you is optional. This allows for it to be heavier, with bigger screen, shorter battery life, less durable, and more use of multi-touch in the interface.


Oct 10, 2011

Do the top engineers prefer Mac OS or Windows?

The cloud has begun to make this a non-question.

For a lot of great engineers, the work resides in the cloud, on a Unix box (or VPS, etc).

The laptop has become just a graphical terminal to the cloud server. Because the Web itself has become the real OS, there isn't much for the client to do but render.

The client-OS is fading into irrelevance.


Oct 10, 2011

What was the most devastating war in human lives, adjusted for world population?

~ 15% of the world's population died in the An Lushan Rebellion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion) in Northern China, 755-763 AD. About 30 million died out of a world population of 200 million.


Oct 11, 2011

Will Ubuntu perform faster if I install it directly on the hard disk?

Yes. Much.


Oct 11, 2011

What is this phenomenon that "Gingers have no souls"?

It comes from the South Park episode Ginger Kids. Free to watch here : http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s09e11-ginger-kids


Oct 11, 2011

What is the best and funniest piece of advice you have ever received?

Carrot-top once pulled this out and yelled, "NEVER BUY POT FROM THE EASTER BUNNY!"


Oct 11, 2011

How do I derive Godel's incompleteness theorem?

The most accessible walk-through of this is probably found in the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979 book) .


Oct 11, 2011

What should one do to combat the despair that comes with the realization that one will, someday soon, die without knowing even the basics of the nature of 97% of the matter and energy in the universe?

Imagine the alternative.

At age 40, you hit the wall. Everything and everyone there is to know, you know.

Now what?


Oct 12, 2011

How did the universe come into being?

I am always amazed at how the Ancient Greeks considered questions of such modern relevance.

Aristotle had this view : When we ask how things came into existence, there are two possibilities :

a) There is an endless chain of causes. Every time we think we've gotten to the "first event" (like the big bang, in modern cosmology), we discover an even earlier event which caused that. So we just keep going back and back, and never find the answer.
b) There is a finite chain of events, beginning with the Primum Movens - "Prime Mover" or "First Cause." Aristotle thought this was the case. He pointed out that the Prime Mover is itself unmovable, or put differently : The First Cause is not caused by anything else. Aristotle thought the First Cause was an enormous buildup of energy - not far from our modern conception of the Big Bang.

The First Cause could be the Big Bang, it could be God, or as yet undiscovered.

The key point is, if we are to entertain the possibility of a First Cause, we must be prepared to accept that it wasn't caused by anything at all. That is, we have to stop asking how it got there.


Oct 12, 2011

Who is interested in doing a Quora Boston meetup Winter 2012?

I'm down.


Oct 12, 2011

If you could distill the purpose of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement down to 4 or 5 words, what would it be?

Hold the financial sector responsible.

The Occupy crowd says a lot of crazy shit, but there is a core set of beliefs which seem to emerge :

Financiers created the 2008 economic crisis by :

Creating exotic investment instruments called 'derivates' which were essentially loopholes in existing regulations. We need new laws to prevent this. (Some will say this is a done deal : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051302393.html)

Committing outright fraud. Madoff is the most famous case, but there are many, many others : For example, Bank of America is accused by AIG of fraudulently inflating the credit ratings of toxic mortgage-backed securities. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/aig_alleging_massive_fraud_sues_bofa_over_mortgage-backed_securities/ Those commiting fraud should go to jail.

Using their considerable influence over elected officials, the very wealthy perpetrators of this disaster had a soft landing. "Too big to fail" bailouts and fat bonus checks. In light of this, Reign in Corporate Influence over Washington (never had that one before ;) and Make em pay (big fines for individuals and corporations, extra taxes which essentially revoke bonuses paid for with tax dollars.)

To compensate for the resultant unemployment, redistribute some wealth from the wealthiest 1% to the other 99%. See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61370.html. There is also the general objection that the wealthiest 1% generally don't pay enough taxes, economic meltdown or not.


Oct 13, 2011

What is a Lisp machine and what is so great about them?

What Patrick Thomson said, also : LISP (and other functional languages ) are easier to parallelize. So they were often the lingua franca of cool looking supercomputers like the Connection Machine :


Oct 13, 2011

What are some of the best anti-jokes?

Q) How many electricians does it take to change a light bulb?
A) One. They are quite skilled at that sort of thing.

Q) What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
A) The Holocaust.


Oct 14, 2011

Who are the most underrated Quora users and why?

Brian Roemmele is a virtual firehose of first rate - and often startling - content.

His answers are more like polished articles, with rich use of imagery. See, for instance -

Where are the world's largest, modern "Ghost Cities"?

and

How does the Göbekli Tepe find change our view of human history?

or just peruse his Answer wall.


Oct 14, 2011

Which Seinfeld character is the most evil?

Nnnnnnnnnewman. "When you control the mail ..... you control .... information. Mwahahahahahaha ..."


Oct 14, 2011

Which piece of architecture is the most inspiring, in the fictional or physical world and why?

A candidate for the architectural zenith of the ancient world, the Colosseum.

It would be a stunning work were it built today with modern technology. It seats as many people as modern football stadiums. But unlike our stadiums, this was built to stand for thousands of years; the sweep and detail of it is almost beyond belief.

This video does a nice 3D virtual reconstruction :


Oct 17, 2011

What will it take for hundreds of millions of people to adopt social location services (like Foursquare & Gowalla)?

There may not be a way. If check-in apps were going to take off, they probably would have. When user growth stalls out like this, it's often a case of a head-on collision between ambition and reality.

Location-based services would love to duplicate the explosive growth of Facebook. But Facebook benefits from network effects that check-ins lack : Facebook is attractive and socially interactive. Check-ins are not.

Attractive :

Why join facebook? To find people from your past. There's a whole pile of people you know in there. Some you haven't spoken to in a decade. There is no good alternative way to find them. This is attractive as hell. Thought experiment : stay away from facebook for a week. Ouch. It's become imperative.

Foursquare? So you can broadcast where you are. Unlock prizes. Become a mayor. Imagine not doing any of that for a week. Big deal.

There's just no imperative here.

Socially Interactive :

The more you use facebook, the more interesting it becomes. A status update brings comments. People get tagged in your photos. Every action you take invites reactions from others - you keep coming back to check.

But when you check-in, there just isn't that much your friends can do in response. So now you're there. OK.

Right now is two hours too late.

My friends might have been interested to know I was going to be in this cafe. Two hours ago when they could have arranged to come as well.

Getting reviews of the food at this cafe would have been great. Two hours ago.
Before I decided to come.

The cafe owner might have been interested in offering me some kind of incentive to come and check in at his cafe and buy stuff. Before I decided to come.
Now that I'm here, he has no motive to do that. Sure, he may want to lure me back with a coupon. In which case he can walk over and hand it to me.

The bottom line : Your real-time location isn't of much interest to your friends or even to businesses. A far richer social experience is to announce where you're headed on your Facebook status.


Oct 18, 2011

If we all agree design is important, why does so much design suck?

Because too many people think they can do it.

It's easy for people to look at a great product or web site and think, "I see why that's good. I understand design." But they don't.

When most people look at a fledgling design, their first instinct is to expand and complicate it. They get ideas for really cool things to add.

Great designers do just the opposite. They look for stuff to take out. They reduce and simplify.

At first, Facebook didn't do many of the cool things MySpace did. But it had a much better design.

In any organization, even a 2-person startup, it's battle between good design (reduce and simplify) and bad design (expand and complicate.) As the organization gets larger, the "stake-holders" overwhelm the designer. The committee of stake-holders are unaware that a) they have hijacked the design process and b) have no idea how to design.

This is more eloquently expressed in this incisive and funny answer : Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?


Oct 18, 2011

Why does time seem to have just one direction from past to future?

It's an attribute of our brains.

It has to do with entropy. Entropy increases from the big bang forward. Heat dissipates.

Now think of your computer. It appears to be doing very non entropic things; to be creating order. Except for all that heat the fan is blowing out of the back of it. The computer has to dissipate heat in order to do its job. Which increases the entropy all around it.

So computers have to work in the direction of increasing entropy. Your brain is a big biological computer. Same thing.

Your perceptive frame of reference is moving towards increasing entropy, so that u can process, remember, etc. Your brain burns glucose like crazy and radiates heat.

(This example is taken from Stephen Hawking, sorry I don't remember where exactly. Hawking uses the term "Psychological Time".)


Oct 18, 2011

What is an intuitive way of explaining how the Fourier transform works?

What Mark Eichenlaub said. Really excellent answer. If you're really pressed for time, a reasonable analog is a prism :


The signal - white light - comes in. It's separated into its component wavelengths. By measuring the intensity at different colors, we can even figure out what type of matter is luminescing (spectral analysis.) This is how we know what stars are made of.

As the prism does with light, we can use Fourier to look for the component vibrations of, say, the stock market, or the human voice.


Oct 19, 2011

What are the best quotations about war?

Winston Churchill wrote this in 1901, decades before great cities lay in rubble and ash, before the searing flash over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the gas chambers, before a nuclear standoff almost became a Mass Extinction event.

In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Oct 19, 2011

I accidentally read my girlfriend's SMSs and found some flirty messages that I feel cross the line. Should I raise this with her, and how?

Stop.

Step back.

Walk away.

You don't do that. You don't read another person's texts or emails.
Ever. Ever.

Firstly, because you are violating their most basic rights as a person (as well as the other party they are writing to.)

Secondly, because it is quite possible you will discover something like this that upsets you. Could be a flirty comment to some dude. Or she could be venting about you after a fight. Things which are harmless so long as they remain private. Things never meant for your eyes.

What you did was worse than stealing $100 from her purse. At least you can give the $100 back.

Let your discomfort with the text be your penance.

Go, and sin no more.


Oct 21, 2011

What are your top 5 Stephen King novels?

Agree with Caz Lessels : it's The Stand, hands down.

While the rest of King's best work is brilliantly creepy, The Stand is less so. Rather, it is staggering in its scope and depth.

A quiet malevolence flutters unnoticed - just a crow. He is an agent of Satan.
He uses man's own devices to herald his destruction : a weaponized killer virus.

So the Apocalypse is on. But unlike so many other Apocalyptic tales, King takes his time. From the first few cases, to the rumors, the run on supplies, the government coverup, the panicked evacuation of cities and the final collapse of military order. I don't think the staggering rundown of human civilization has ever been described in such chaotic detail.

And that's just one amazing thread of the novel. It's as if King crammed 5 great novels into one (yes, it's a big book.)

It is also a Biblical prophesy lifted right out of Revelations. The apostate of Hell - the Walking Dude - is no ordinary villain. He is soft spoken, charming, folksy. He's funny. You'd like him. He's evil personified.

It is a coming of age story. The young Harold Lauder - pimply, pretentious and horny - finds his way through the wreckage of humanity, makes good use of his brains and eloquence to become a valued and respected member of the survivor community, something he never was pre-plague.

It is greek tragedy. That same Harold Lauder, deprived the affections of a girl he is crushing on, pens the ultimate expression of hubris : "We are often told that we must change for the good of the world. But the world must change for the good of me." He defects to the dark side. Only hours before his death does he repent.

It is a road trip. We follow assorted bands of survivors as they make their way to either Las Vegas (dark side) or Boulder (light side.) Here again, King takes his time. We stop in little towns, we feel the shoe leather wearing down, we feel our bodies getting leaner and our minds clearing. Some are made stronger by the journey, others are broken by it.

There are scenes of great poignancy. When the plague first escapes the bio-lab, it is carried by a security guard who decided to run for it. On an empty back road, in the middle of the night, a great sand-plume rises behind a sole rusty yellow car. The seed of humanity's doom.

The characters are unusually distinct, and there are a great many of them. They stay with you after you finish the book.

It's not really a dark novel (aside from the small detail that 99% of humanity dies.) It's more akin to Star Wars, where the forces of good and evil interplay - often within the same person.

OK, enough gushing I guess. I like this novel so much that I read all 1000 pages six times. And I have the attention span of a neutrino.


Oct 21, 2011

Why do Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never wear contact lenses?

Most likely it's due to their age. (Why older people avoid contacts is an interesting question. Were contacts not yet popular during their opinion-forming years? Or - as we get older, do we simply get less vain and more practical [contacts can be a pain.])


Oct 21, 2011

What is New London, CT known for?

I am from there. There isn't much to do, really.

Historically, it's known for being burnt down by Benedict Arnold in 1781, and being virtually flattened by the hurricane of 1938. And then catching fire. So notable for its flammability.

It's now home to the US Coast Guard Academy and Connecticut College (where my dad taught.) Both campuses are rather insular so there isn't as much as a student vibe as you might think.

New London is heavily influenced by a massive naval presence across the river in Groton : A naval base and nuclear sub manufacturer (Electric Boat.) Together with the Millstone nuclear reactor complex a few miles up the road in Niantic, these comprise the areas primary employers.


Oct 21, 2011

I don't believe in god and I am having trouble finding meaning in life. What should I do now?

My answer is rather simple minded but ... here it is.

Absent any divine mandates, just strive to be useful to others.


Oct 22, 2011

Why does my boyfriend always tell me "you're pretty when you're quiet" whenever I try to ask him a question?

"Yea, but I'm beautiful when I get respect." And walk out.


Oct 22, 2011

What are some cultural faux pas in New England?

Lack of reverence for chowda. Like many great dishes, chowder began as a poor man's sustenance made with local ingredients. Its legacy goes back to the early settlers. Nobody makes it the same way, and recipes have been passed down for generations.

If you have chowder at a restaurant, the server is almost certainly is going to ask, in the most casual tone : "So, eh, how is yowah chowda tonight?"

This is no question about soup. It translates to : "What do you think of our restaurant? Of me? Of my ancestors? Of our great nation, forged in blood and turmoil in the wilderness?"

Don't panic. You answer, "This is the best chowder I've ever had." They will say, "Eh, it is, uh, good isn't it?" and walk away.

Everywhere you go, it is the best chowder you ever had. Never faint praise like "it's good." Qualifiers like "it's some of the best chowder i've had" is dangerous.
It's the best. Everywhere.

Legal Seafoods likes to boast that their chowder is served at presidential inaugurations. They say it on their menus. Their napkins. On the radio. Because it's all you need to know.

And of course, do not ever, ever, ever, send the chowder back.


Oct 24, 2011

What have been your most absolutely mortifying, horrendously awkward social moments?

Sometimes, a great joke pops into your head, and bypasses the "is this really a good idea?" censor.

My first job out of college. Day before Thanksgiving. My boss says to me, "Oh geez. Just found out my elderly uncle died. Now I have to call everyone to say he won't be coming to thanksgiving."

Me : "Now that is an understatement !!!"

Ooooooh ....


Oct 24, 2011

My girlfriend says that she will break up with me unless I stop using Quora because I spend way too much time on here. What should I do?

Downvote her.


Oct 24, 2011

If an atom is 99.9999% empty space, then why is most matter opaque? Why doesn't light go straight through the empty space?

This seems weird because we are used to thinking of subatomic particles as point-masses moving in newtonian ways.

The electrons around a nucleus are not really 'orbiting', they exist as standing waves which surround the nucleus.

The photon (itself a wave packet) interacts with that "shroud" around the nucleus. Can't miss it.


Oct 24, 2011

What started World War II?

An inequitable end to World War I. Tensions were left simmering between the combatant nations. Germany was especially humiliated, forced to concede land and make reparations. While these material losses are often cited by historians as the cause of WWII, they weren't that devastating. But German national pride was deeply wounded.

Hyperinflation. Germany had borrowed a lot to fund World War I. Reparations also accounted for about 1/3 of their deficit. The Wiemar Republic began to just print money. Their currency collapsed and people went hungry. The aftershocks of hyperinflation continued throughout the 20's.

The Great Depression. Just when Germany's economy was beginning to stabilize, a global Great Depression pulled the rug out from under them.

Adolf Hitler. A master manipulator of public opinion, electrifying orator, ruthless political maneuverer. He blamed the Allies and the Jews for hyperinflation. He warned of Germany falling to a conspiracy of Jews and Communists. By evoking resentment and fear, he quickly turned Germany into a fascist warrior-nation hell-bent on war with its neighbors with all of its industrial capacity and military agility.


Oct 26, 2011

What are good things to do during long international flights?

Here's a time sink I've found that can be sort of rewarding. It requires workable in-flight wifi.

Become a virtual explorer : Bring up googlemaps, zoomed out view of the united states. Click anywhere (I like the mid west) and start zooming in. The idea is to land on some quiet little town, in the middle of nowhere, that you otherwise would never know about.

One rule I like to have is : the town must have at least one movie theatre. That indicates some kind of cohesive culture, and not just a few blocks of houses and a gas station.

Get down to street view. Get a look at as much of it as you can. Read up on their history. The last five years. Hunt down some residents on facebook, tell them about your project and ask them to describe a typical weekend there, etc.

Blog as you go :)


Oct 26, 2011

What makes a cheap beer cheap and an expensive beer expensive?

Authenticity.

In North America, the critical difference is that rice is used as a cheap alternative to barley malt. Sometimes corn. These provide cheap sugars that the yeast convert to alcohol and CO2.

This isn't beer at all to many places in the world (certainly Germany). This is just some randomly fermented crap in a can. This is Budweiser, Coors, etc.

"Real" beer contains barley, water, yeast and hops - nothing else. (OK, some pumpkin, pine needles, etc are OK for flavor,) Barley malt is expensive stuff. A 24 ounce bag of it costs about 30 bucks.

But that's what real beer - Sam Adams, Anchor Steam, Sierra Nevada - is made of.

Historical note : The introduction of rice and corn into American beer occurred during World War II. Big breweries, getting back on their feet after prohibition, had to deal with the high war-time cost of grain and a primarily female domestic customer base.

So they sought ways to make a lighter, cheaper beer to target to women. After the war, it stuck. (Perhaps because returning GI's were happy to drink anything!)


Oct 26, 2011

What are the best real-life examples of the law of unintended consequences in action?

In 1997, Microsoft invested $150M in Apple , which was "90 days from bankruptcy". http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/

Why'd they do it? They say it was to maintain Apple as a platform for their Office and Explorer. It may have been to keep the anti-trust wolves at bay. It may even have been personal, Gates' way of burying the hatchet with Jobs, or more malevolently, to humble Jobs by saving him.

Whatever the motive, Microsoft certainly didn't plan on reviving a monster competitor which would define and largely control new markets in portable music, smartphones, and tablets. Whose market cap would eclipse Microsoft's in 2011.

This is possibly the biggest business blunder of the 20th century.


Oct 31, 2011

Which television shows have the most shocking season or series finale(s)?

The mother of them all : Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen. The final episode to the series M*A*S*H, 1983.

This 2.5 hour episode was the most watched thing ever on television until the 2010 superbowl. And that's probably due to increased population over 27 years.

This episode takes a very dark turn from its otherwise lighthearted (if anti-war) theme. I think the writers felt an obligation to be truthful about the nature of war.

Hawkeye has had a nervous breakdown, and is just beginning to separate fact from fantasy.

He remembers being on a bus. The bus pulls over - leery of enemy soldiers ahead. A baby cries. Hawkeye admonishes the mother to keep the baby quiet. The mother smothers the baby to death before Hawkeye realizes what's happened. Hawkeye is so messed up from the experience that he attempts surgery - without anasthesia.

Father Malcahey is rendered almost deaf by a mortar shell.

Major Winchester has taught five Koreans to play mozart, and takes great joy in conducting his makeshift orchestra. The musicians are killed in an artillery attack.

The war ends at midnight. The characters leave the camp, one by one, to return home. It's clear at times that the fourth wall has come down, and the actors are saying good bye to each other and the audience. The tears are real. "What will we do now?" is the question on everybody's mind.


In 2011 TV Guide ranked this episode as the #1 most unforgettable TV finale (May 22, 2011).


Oct 31, 2011

Does the United States have the greatest fighting force in the history of the world?

Yes - by any metric you care to invent. We are the only nation on earth that has demonstrated the capability to fight two large, simultaneous wars and still maintain forces in reserve.

Some figures :

The US spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined (about 40% of global spending.)


The UK has one aircraft carrier. Russia has one, France has one.

The USA has eleven.

In addition to just sheer quantity of weapons, the US is unrivalled in the world for its ability to project military power. The US has had more practice than anybody in deploying not only the weapons of war but also the supply lines of fuel, ammunition, parts, radar, toilet paper, medical supplies and on and on.

The US is really good at this war thing.

Strange when you consider that a nation with so little to fear - two huge oceans on either side, virtually untouched by war in the 20th century - became the most militarized country on earth.


Oct 31, 2011

Why didn't humans bother with agriculture (toiling the soil, private property, etc.) for 100,000, or so, years?

The emergence of agriculture, about 10,000 BCE, is best attributed to two factors, I think : brains and climate.

Homo Sapien arrives on Earth about 200,000 years ago. But they did not achieve "behavioral modernity" until ~50,000 years ago. That is, it was only then that they began to show certain critical cognitive skills and social structures : they made art, buried their dead, engaged in religious ceremony, cared for their sick, etc. We begin to see symbols and the formation of language and abstraction.

Why the 150,000 year wait? Nobody knows really why so much time elapsed until the "Great Leap Forward". There appears to have been some change in the human brain - not in size but in structure. One theory holds that the change was sudden, perhaps due to the Toba catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory. Another theory holds that it was not sudden at all, just a series of changes that reached critical mass.

However it happened, 50,000 years ago humans tamed fire and were getting along much more capably than any of us probably would in their environment :)

But ... they were stuck in an Ice Age (cold period technically). The earth would remain quite cold until quickly snapping out of it about 12000 BCE.

Humans began to sow crops almost immediately when the warming period began.


Nov 2, 2011

After the first date, what are some indicators that the girl doesn't want you to ask her out on a second date?

When, um, you ask her on a second date and she says No.

You may be over-thinking this whole thing.


Nov 2, 2011

Why are Americans so scared of communism and communists even though they seem to have no idea what it means?

Without getting into the capitalist/communist debate (i''m in the middle somewhere), I think a simple answer emerges:

The cold war was fucking terrifying.

Massive nuclear stockpiles had been accumulated. An ICBM can strike its target in 30 minutes. The whole war - and human civilization - could be over in two hours.

No generation had ever faced the tangible, entirely realistic possibility that mankind could be eradicated and the planet rendered unfit for human life.

The older among us remember, as school kids, the bombing drills where you got under your desk so as not to be hit with flying glass from the blast wave. The news reports of near-launches due to misunderstanding or equipment failure. The tense stand-off of the Cuban missile crisis where our president directly threatened to nuke the Soviets.

Most people thought it was only a matter of time. Neither side would ever back down, something would go wrong at some point. Both sides adhered to the policy of "Launch on warning" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning
meaning, you launched your missiles at the first sign the enemy has launched. Or seems to have. You can't wait for the detonation because that''ll knock out your communications. You have 30 minutes to figure out if those radar blips are an attack. 29 now.

Most people I knew were sadly resigned to the belief that one or two more generations of mankind might exist, but not more.

We were scared of communists, alright. (And they were scared of us. BTW, I worked for the Pentagon during the last years of the Cold War.)


Nov 3, 2011

What technology does Facebook use to auto-update information on a page without reloading it?

View Source!

Glancing at the FB code, it appears that a timer runs on the client which periodically pings the server for updates. (Which is the only sensible way I can think of to do it in a robust way.)

onloadRegister(function (){window.presenceNotifications =
new OriginalNotifications({"updateTime":1320341118000,"latestNotif":1320340517,"latestReadNotif":null,"updatePeriod":480000,
"cacheVersion":2,"allowDesktopNotifications":false,"notifReceivedType":"notification","wrapperID":"fbNotificationsJewel",
"contentID":"fbNotificationsList","counterInFront":1})});

Nov 3, 2011

Why don't companies pump oxygen into their offices?

That's a myth about casinos and O2 : http://www.snopes.com/luck/casino.asp.

Increasing oxygen levels by even a few percent presents a fire hazard; fires catch easier, spread faster, and otherwise inflammable material starts to burn.

Considering how most casinos allow smoking (Vegas, anyway) - cranking up the O2 is a bad idea.


Nov 3, 2011

What are Wikipedia's flaws?

It is controlled by a discordant mob.

Unlike Quora, it attempts to provide a single, definitive article on any subject. This is fine for purely factual matters; anything that might require balance between conflicting points of view is hopeless. The discordant mob will argue endlessly in Talk, and often threaten each other with administrative action.

You can't edit it. I'm serious. Pick any three topics at random : Obama, Pokemon, Arizona. Locked, locked, unlocked. 2 out of 3. This is probably a good thing, actually, given the discordant mob.


So among the mob, the threats, and the locks - a meta flaw emerges : Wikipedia is a very unrewarding place to invest your time.


Nov 3, 2011

Is there a name for the phenomenon of being able to do many things short term, but few things long term?

Sprinter.


Nov 4, 2011

What popular programming advice is plain wrong?

A couple of small nits. In C++, there is this myth that just won't die :
Pre-incrementing a primitive type is faster than post-incrementing.

So we see loops everywhere like this :
for (int i=0; i<42; ++i)
instead of
for (int i=0; i<42; i++)

The reasoning is easy to see if you consider replacing the primitive type int with a real class. In the post-increment case, both i and i++ have to briefly coexist - so we need to make a copy.

For primitive types like int , however, compilers optimized for this centuries ago.
It's one of the first and simplest things to go after when optimizing.
Try it both ways and do a binary diff. Same assembly. Not faster. Never was.

And this : Linked lists are awesome because they do insertions really fast.

Sure. Assuming God handed you a pointer to the place you need to do the insert. Otherwise you have to traverse the list, hand-over-hand, to find the damn spot where you need to insert. N/2 on average. Just as bad as block-moving half the items in a dynamic array to make room. Except in the latter case you have random access after the insert.

There are some valid occasions to use a naked linked list for actual work, but they are pretty rare (e.g., you're not worried about insertions but instead want to write functional-programming style code which recurses rather than iterates.)


Nov 4, 2011

How do I recover from being falsely accused of cheating and having to breakup from someone I was falling in love with?

Mebbe take a break from the relationship thing for a while. Being alone sucks, but after the kind of losses you've suffered, and this recent debacle, a little time to chill might be in order.

A thief keeps his money in his shoe. A liar won't believe a word you say. And a cheater can't trust anyone. It was likely him that was cheating, or about to, or being dishonest in some fundamental way. He assumes everyone else is just as sneaky, because it's the only thing he knows.

So maybe some time alone just to feel good about yourself. So good that, should this situation ever arise again with another man, you can respond, "No. I didn't. Now get out and lose my number. Douche."


Nov 8, 2011

Why can't humans walk straight?

The same reason all objects in the universe are rotating : It's more likely.

Of the infinitely many angular momenta an object can possess, only one of them is 0.

Similarly, walking in a straight line is highly unlikely because our bodies are never perfectly symmetrical. One eye sees clearer than the other, one ear hears better, one leg is longer or stronger, one *shoe* is tied tighter. We've all got a slight "spin" to one side or another.

So we shouldn't really expect that humans are able to walk a long straight line.

For other species, it does appear that their evolution path favored the ability to
do this (like migrating birds), so they developed sensitivities to external reference points like - perhaps - earth's magnetic field. (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/birds-navigate-using-magnetic-compass-vision)

But absent some specially evolved capability, this isn't a reasonable expectation.


Nov 8, 2011

After the U.S. Civil War, should the proponents of secession have been tried for treason or sedition and, if found guilty, executed after the war?

No. This brutal war of attrition - still America's costliest - had lain whole cities to waste and buried a good part of a generation. Lincoln wanted no part of retribution, trials, or hangings. He wanted the union to endure, and to welcome the Confederates back. He characterizes the war as God's punishment to both North and South for slavery.

From his 2nd inaugural address (a few weeks before the South surrendered - it was already clear they would lose. Lincoln knows he is speaking to the defeated):

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained... Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other...

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God... He now wills to remove, He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came...

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.


For the same reason we left Emperor Hirohito untouched... There are times, in victory, when a bit of grace goes a long way to furthering the goals for which the war was fought in the first place.


Nov 9, 2011

How do I get users to join my site?

There is a book which was so popular and oft-quoted it's become passe, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It's how about trends catch on. It speaks about certain types of people who can help : Mavens (people considered expert in their field with big audiences), Connectors (people who seem to know everybody), and Sale People. Worth a read.

More to the point : You need help from different kinds of people. The task is to discover who (and in the case of your service, where.)

PS : Your site design looks pretty good to me. Certainly launchable.


Nov 10, 2011

Is it acceptable that my girlfriend has been chatting with her ex on Facebook behind my back?

It's not subject to your acceptance.

We can't control who our partners speak to, and shouldn't try. Most people I know keep in contact with at least one ex-. I do.

As for my girlfriend, if she wants to speak to an ex- of hers, that is absolutely none of my business. I have no right to snoop or even ask.

It's all about trust and R-E-S-P-E-C-T.


Nov 14, 2011

What are Steve Jobs' best quotes on marketing?

From a 2008 interview with Fortune :

"We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."


Nov 16, 2011

Is the USA's increased military presence in Australia justified? Why, or why not?

I think there is good reason for it. It's really about the South China Sea.


These are critical shipping lanes and fishing waters. There is also evidence of oil reserves at the ocean floor. The problem is that China has long claimed the entire South China Sea as its territorial waters.

Recently, China has begun to more aggressively assert these claims, especially in the territorial waters of the Phillipines. There have been repeated incursions here by the Chinese recently, among other disputes. Secretary Clinton met with officials in the Phillipines Wednesday (Nov 9, 2011).

China obviously can't have the South China Sea all to itself. To guard American military and economic interests in the area, it makes sense to shore up American presence in the region, which will hopefully encourage China to restrain its territorial claims.


Nov 18, 2011

Why is so much of Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don't solve a problem?

Tech transfer?

The free market cares nothing about "need" - only "demand". It's "need" when you think people want it. It's "demand" when they actually do.

A generation ago, people suggested that Television should be flooded with mostly educational content. It was what people needed.

They disagreed and switched channels. There was no demand.


Nov 18, 2011

How should I answer this Facebook interview question: "How many people in the world are using a cell phone RIGHT NOW?"?

There are three basic keys to questions like this :

a) Go for a very rough estimate, an order of magnitude.
b) Like a detective, hunt around for guessable quantities that can lead to the answer. The guesses only have to be semi-sane. Nobody expects you to know things like precisely how many laptops there are in the world. It would be a little weird if you did.
c) It is good to know some basic numbers : population of earth, population of US, diameter of earth, etc.

So for this question you'd probably want to guesstimate how much time a person spends each month on his cell phone. an hour? Two? Close. Then estimate how many people have cellphones on earth - 1.5 Billion? Maybe. Now it's a straightforward algebra problem.

How many ping pong balls fit in a 747? Let's pretend the cabin is a cylinder. How wide? 25 feet? How long? Hmm ... about 6 feet per row - how many rows again on a 747? I can't remember cuz i'm scared to fly, let's say 40. So the volume of that cylinder can now be calculated. What's the volume of a ping pong ball? Well it's a sphere about yay big. Sure, the balls won't fit without wasting space, but that's nothing compare to the errors in our earlier guesses so ignore that. Now it's a geometry problem out of a high school textbook.

Don't sweat the accuracy of your initial guesses - it doesn't matter, especially if they are readily looked up. Only that they're not insane. What matters is that you are boiling down an apparently intractable problem into smaller, more tractable problems - and aren't freaked out by uncertainty.

The ping pong problem brings up a fourth point (three was just an estimate) :

d) Don't do painfully precise calculations on rough guesses.

You might be tempted to calculate how much space is wasted by packing spheres into a cylinder. This is meaningless as your estimate of the plane's volume is already off by 50% or so. The space between balls can't be more than 20%, so forget it. You may go way overboard and start fretting over the optimal packing algorithm for balls in a sphere. Huge red flag here which signals a common pitfall of some very bright people : you get bogged down in hard problems which don't actually matter.

All of this is very pertinent to the real world. "What is the database load going to be if my cool photo sharing app gets tech crunched?"

"Well, the population of the US is 300 million, maybe 2% will try it in a week. So 5 million people will upload - what - 10 images each? At typical iPhone resolution ..."


Nov 19, 2011

Did police at UC Davis overreact by pepper spraying seated protestors at point-blank range on November 18, 2011?

Definitely. Case law and police policy are very clear that pepper spray is not to be used on passively resisting protestors (refusing to move, locking arms, etc.)

Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332957.html

In addition, regional and state-wide police practice and protocol clearly suggest that using pepper spray against nonviolent protestors is excessive. The law regarding a police officer's use of force against a passive individual was sufficiently clear at the time of the events at issue in this case that the defendants cannot claim qualified immunity on the ground that they made a reasonable mistake of law. See Saucier, 121 S.Ct. at 2158.


Update: The police can also be heard preparing to fire pepperballs into the crowd a few minutes later. Please see my post Smoking gun at six minutes: UCD Police can be heard preparing to fire pepper balls into the crowd.


Nov 19, 2011

According to atheists, what happens after death?

They don't go anywhere. They're gone.


Nov 20, 2011

What are some films, series, videos that communicate how "everything and everyone are connected"?

The (awesome) domino scene in V for Vendetta (2006 movie) makes explicit mention of this theme (skip to 1:50) -


Nov 21, 2011

What type of rifle was wielded by UC Davis Police during the pepper spray incident (Nov 18, 2011)?

Somebody please attach this image to the question, quora's gone temporarily wonky on me :)


Nov 21, 2011

I’m an aspiring entrepreneur on the ground floor of a new start-up. What’s the best way to respond to critics who recommend “getting a job”?

Skeptic : "You should just get a job!"
Entrepreneur : "Why?"
S : "So you have a stable income until you're 65, and a nice retirement fund."
E : "What then?"
S : "Whatever you want! Follow your passions!"
E : "I'm doing that now."


Nov 22, 2011

Why does wine often have a more "sophisticated" image than beer?

Wine pairs better with fine cuisine. The bitterness and fizziness of beer doesn't work well with lots of different flavors.

Wine is aged, beer is not. So a lot more effort is expended and knowledge required (is this peaking?) and a great many extra factors come into play : type of barrel, temperature, etc. I think it's safe to say that greater expertise is required to master either wine-making or wine-snobbery. This increases the perceived value.


Nov 22, 2011

Is starting a reply with, "Wrong," (too) aggressive?

Right.


Nov 22, 2011

What are the best love poems ever?

Gotta go with Byron :

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Guys - memorize this. This will seriously get you l...iterate.


Nov 22, 2011

What would you advise a 20 year old to learn?

I would ask this digital native with a fresh perspective to tell me what i should learn.

I know, I know, needs improvement :)


Nov 22, 2011

Is there a polite way to interrupt or stop a 'Death by Powerpoint' presentation?

Make like you just got back from the optometrist, they dilated your pupils, and you can't see the damn screen.

They will almost certainly say, ""Oh, i'll just talk you through it as i go."

You answer, "Well I want to refer it to later though. Email it to me? For now, let's just have a conversation, don't worry about hitting your bullet points."

I've actually done this. Twice. Never did open the emails.


Nov 23, 2011

Instead of using pepper spray, what should Lt. John Pike and his partner have done about the UC Davis protestors who had been told to disperse?

First, diplomacy. Diplomacy is not about orders or threats. Diplomacy is about empathy. You send one , preferably high ranking officer to sit with them and explain :

"I have to clear this path, and I'm trying to find a way to do it which is also respectful of you guys. If you don't want to get arrested, I need you to leave. If you do want to get arrested, let's get up on our feet and walk out of here like gentleman together. I don't want to pry your hands apart. That's not respectful. Let's stand up and show everybody how peaceful protest works. Beats waiting around until you have to pee."

Here's the Austin, TX chief of police talking to protestors before arresting them.


Notice he took his hat off. That's an important bit of psychology. He is non threatening and non threatened. He sits with them. He's chill.

Result : protestor walks out, head held high, his point made. Nobody loses their job, no press conference, no investigation. Everybody lives.

The area is clear and ... how do the protesters feel about it?


That's how you move people.

Protests are unique situations that require special handling.


Nov 23, 2011

What would be the best song to go with a video of cops pepperspraying protesters?

Oh. I got this.

Hands Held High by Lincoln Park -

Turn my mic up louder,
I got to say somethin.
...
People on the street,
they panic and start running.
....
Sick of the dark ways,
we march to the drumming.
Jump when they tell us
they want to see jumping.
Fuck that, I want to
see some fist pumping.
Like this war's really just a different brand of war
Like it doesn't cater the rich and abandon poor

Like they understand you in the back of the jet
When you can't put gas in your tank

These fuckers are laughing their way to the bank
and cashing the check ...


Nov 23, 2011

What does liking sandwiches cut diagonally rather than straight say about a person?

You like precision. Cutting down the middle, you have to guess the half-way point. Cutting corner-to-corner, it's a perfectly even split every time.


Nov 25, 2011

What is the best way to prepare for the Putnam Competition?

Practice sniffing out the problems you can solve. You're going to be able to do 4-6 out of 12 if you're very, very good. (If you are capable of doing 12/12 you certainly wouldn't need advice from me or anyone else :) ) So it's a good idea to sharpen your intution as to which problems you should try, and how much time you should spend deciding that.


Nov 25, 2011

Why does Britain prefer tea to coffee? What's the fascination with black tea instead of coffee?

I'm guessing this question was posed by a fellow American. The underlying question may be : Why do Americans prefer coffee to tea?

Pre-revolution colonists loved tea. In 1773 Great Britian levied the Tea Tax against the American Colonies. Rupert Baines points out that the Tax actually decreased the overall tax on tea - making smuggling less lucrative for people like John Hancock. So there seems to have been some deft propaganda about this to the advantage of a few revolutionaries. In any case, all hell broke loose.

In addition to the Boston Tea Party, an organized effort ensued to stop drinking tea altogether and switch to coffee. From Wikipedia :

In 1773, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife stating, "Tea must be universally renounced and I must be weaned, and the sooner the better." Thus began the American shift from tea to coffee. In a concentrated boycott, the housewives of Falmouth, Massachusetts publicly united, vowing to serve only coffee in their homes. This inspired other households throughout the colonies, both in the north and south, to do the same.


Soon it was seen as a betrayal of the colonies to drink or serve tea. In 3 years, the colonies were at war with Great Britain. The switch to coffee took permanent hold in American culture.

Leading us to pose questions like this :)


Nov 25, 2011

What one programming language would you suggest someone learn?

Python : for clarity of syntax, 'batteries included' set of libraries, elegance, consistency, lack of historical kludgery, and existence of capable web frameworks should you want to build out a serious product.


Nov 25, 2011

Why did the 1970s suck so much?

In America anyway,

There was great disillusionment when MLK and RFK were assassinated. The idealism of the 60's started to sink into sad resignation.

The celebratory hedonism of the flower children morphed into senseless self-destruction (RIP John Belushi, Jim Morrison, etc etc.)

Nixon got elected and turned out to be a paranoid mini-despot. The Watergate scandal was referred to by his successor (whom he appointed) as "our long national nightmare."

The OPEC oil embargo sent "oil shocks" through our economy for years creating "stagflation" - inflation without economic growth.

We lost our first war in Vietnam. We watched helplessly as saigon fell, and pushed helicopters off an aircraft carrier to make room for a panicked evacuation.

The Cold War reached its most dangerous apex. A lot of folks expected to be nuked any day.

And worse : Disco. Christ.

The zeitgeist was captured well in the song American Pie. It was really about the death of Buddy Holly, but many folks felt it spoke to this general feeling of defeat and hopelessness :

A long long time ago
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

...

Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rolling stone
But that's not how it used to be
...
Helter skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast
...
Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
...
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died .


Little did anyone know what great things were quietly stirring in labs and garages. The microcomputer. The internet. That the Cold War wouldn't last forever and the missiles wouldn't go off.


Nov 25, 2011

How has the human condition most meaningfully changed over the course of the last century?

It happened in the last 15 years.

In the developed world, we are never lost (GPS) and never out of touch with everyone we know.


Nov 26, 2011

I'm unable to feel happy for anyone. What should I do?

Start small.

You're happy for a stray puppy when it finds a home, yes?

Work up from there :)


Nov 26, 2011

What movies have used a dead, incapacitated, or not present character to drive the central drama of the narrative? Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca would be a prime example.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world. A dying man divulges the location of hidden treasure, setting off a (mad) chase by a horde of (mad) people to find it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057193/plotsummary


Nov 27, 2011

What is it like to be a police officer at an Occupy protest?

It would be great to hear directly from such an officer.

I visited OccupyBoston last friday for the first time. I spoke to an officer for about 5 minutes. Here's how it went.

The police presence around boston is pretty restrained. Cops stood in pairs on all four sides to total just 8. After hanging around "Tent City" for an hour I approached one. He was African-American, about 35, on the big side.

I was a little scared to approach him, coming out of the camp. I came no closer than 6 feet and just looked at him. He beamed a disarming smile. I closed the distance and asked, "So how is this detail for you?"

"It's pretty good, really. Not much to do. The kids are pretty nice."

I said, "I am totally blown away at how organized it is."

He smirked, "You think it's organized?"

"They are trying to keep things under control. What I worry about is you have this open camp, serving free food to anybody and providing shelter. So you got some drug addicts and drug dealers coming in, mixing up with the protestors."

"There's also a couple people being verbally aggressive with us, This is where alcohol usually comes in. Other protestors usually step in and stop them. I mean, I'm used to getting yelled at."

"They have their own sort of security force they've put together. Some who have been bouncers at bars or ex-military. When there's an incident, we let them handle it. They call us over if they need us. It's a lot like we're supervising them. It's tense, you have to watch without interfering, but be ready to jump in if things go wrong. We've been asked in a couple of times."

I asked him, "Do you think they should clear the camp?"

"Yea, I don't think it's good for their cause anymore. Because of the element it attracts, not because of the protestors. If something happens, it's just going to hurt them."

I was about to ask how he would feel if he had to be part of a force which would finally clear out the protesters (they have a restraining order which expires on Dec 1st), but heard "Mic check! Mic check!" and looked over my shoulder.

I looked back at him and he nodded toward the direction of the announcement. I couldn't tell if he thought I wanted to go over or was suggesting that I do. "It's OK. Nice talking to you."

The officer I spoke to is on the right. For some reason, taking a direct picture didn't feel like the right thing to.

The camp.


Wayne - a vet who was unofficially in charge of the camps 'Safety' team. (Nobody is actually in charge of anything, part of occupy's ethos.) He walked by the officer I spoke to at one point, patted him on the shoulder and said hello.


Nov 27, 2011

What is the worst quality a person can possess?

Inability wrapped in belligerence.

Many times I've seen people with very little understanding or experience in a field deflect counterarguments with threats, yelling - intimidation basically.

Smart people bail. Timid sychophants - even less capable - gather 'round.

Instead of solving real problems, the purpose of the group becomes to appease the fragile ego of the belligerent. The ship goes down because nobody wants to mention the danger of icebergs.


Nov 27, 2011

What is the origin of the use of the word 'bounce' to mean 'to exit'?

It may have its origins as a verb meaning "to throw somebody out", as in "bouncer."

"'The Bouncer' is merely the English 'chucker out'. When liberty verges on license and gaiety on wanton delirium, the Bouncer selects the gayest of the gay, and - bounces him!"

London Daily News, Thursday 26 July 1883


Nov 27, 2011

What are some “unofficial mottos” of programming languages? For example, Haskell’s is "Avoid success at all costs."

Lisp : To iterate is human; to recurse is divine.


Nov 27, 2011

Why is the inventor of the television not as widely known as the inventors of other revolutionary media?

As Aditya Sengupta indicated, he got screwed over by David Sarnoff, head of RCA. Sarnoff aligned the entire broadcast industry to ignore his patents and force him into expensive legal battles to in an attempt to enforce the patents.
Engineers spent a lot of time to "work around Farnsworth", making trivial modifications of his design to confuse juries. A great movie about it was made by PBS :

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/technology/bigdream/abprogram.html


Nov 27, 2011

What are the funniest Hitler (Downfall parody) videos?

Hitler plans burning man :


Nov 27, 2011

Why is π regarded as such an important number in mathematics?

It is almost always the first transcendental number people encounter. So, not only is there no pattern at all to its decimal expansion (like square root of 2), it's not the root of any polynomial (unlike square root two.)

It appears everywhere in physics and geometry. Circles appear in nature because of their symmetry and the property that they maximize the enclosed area.

I think it is seductive to people that such a simple figure as a circle could yield such an elusive quantity.


Nov 27, 2011

Should I tell a coworker in a short skirt that her panties are showing when she bends over and/or sits?

Perhaps the real question is : Why? ;)


Nov 27, 2011

What are some good dramatic movies about adult outsiders, misfits, outcasts, and loners?

The "fish out of water" theme is one of my favorites.

Into the wild : A college graduate who can't tolerate the modern world goes to live in the woods in Alaska.

The graduate :
Another college graduate who finds upper middle class life banal and meeaningless, and can't seem to find anything that matters (don't die without seeing this.)

The Terminal :

A man who can't speak English gets stuck in an American airport. His government was just overthrown and he is nation-less. He is unable to enter the US and unable to go back home. He can't understand what is happening and gets virtually no help from anybody.

Gypsy 83 :
A couple of goth kids from the midwest ditch everything and hit the road ...



The elephant man: (which i still can't bear to watch all the way through)




Anything with an alien in human form naturally fits into this. My favorites -

Starman

KPAX:

Somebody, hopefully they'll make this book into a movie : Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein.


Nov 28, 2011

What happens if you learn theorem proofs without trying to come up with them first?

It is as if somebody has blind folded you, taken you by the hand, and walked you down a complex path to get somewhere.

If you pay attention, you can memorize the number of steps and where to turn.

But you don't see the landscape - the trees and houses you're avoiding, the hill you're getting around.

You know how to get there, but have no sense of all of what the path is through.


Nov 28, 2011

Will we ever feel nostalgic towards CDs the way we are for records?

Perhaps not, for three reasons.

Reason 1 : There was no internet.
The album cover was a very big deal. It was the visual part of the artist's expression. You'd scrutinize every square inch of the album cover as you listened. You'd use it to clean your ... whoa - mom, that's not mine. Holding it for a friend.

Today this doesn't matter because you just hit the band's website.

Reason 2 : There was no internet.
As Dave Land said, there was scarcity. This was really the only way to listen to a quality recording. Tape and FM really didn't sound good. If it was a rare LP you'd have to try to find it. Scour record stores. Make new friends. Who stash weed in your room. Serious, mom.

There were also girls (!?!) at the record store. You could even tell the ones that liked the same music you do.

There are still avid LP collectors today, but they don't have to hunt and hope. They just go online and find it. Money talks.

Reason 3 : There was no internet.

If it didn't come on the radio, and you didn't have it on vinyl - you weren't gonna hear it. At all. You couldn't pull it up on youtube or pirate it. It had value.

CDs : No cover, no value, no friends, no hunt, no weed, no girls. This is progress?


Nov 29, 2011

What are some of the funniest pictures ever taken?






Nov 29, 2011

What scientific or philosophical justifications exist for Occam's Razor?

This is probably the single most mis-invoked bit of philopsophy in popular culture.

As Karl Mamer and others have stated a little differently, Occam's razor is not a principle. It is simply advice.

It is best summarized in the phrase, "Do not multiply entities [or assumptions] beyond necessity." (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). Well, obviously you don't want to make unnecessary assumptions. Given that an extra assumption introduces an additional 'contingency' or possibility of being false, introducing one unnecessarily is obviously a bad idea. This doesn't really bear pointing out, philosophically.

It's really a caution about human psychology. We are an imaginative species.
Occams's razor is simply a reminder not to make a bunch of crazy shit up.

For illustration, let's turn to South Park. Regarding a 9/11 Conspiracy Theory:

George W. Bush: Yes, quite simple to pull off really, all I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers, then on 9/11 we pretended like 4 planes were being hijacked when really we just rerouted them to Pennsylvania (state), then flew 2 military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives, then shot all the witnesses of flight 93 with an F-15 after blowing up The Pentagon with a cruise missile. It was only the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan, ever, ever.

Kyle: Really?!

[...]

Kyle: Who's really responsible for 9/11?

Stan: Who do ya think? Some pissed off Muslims.


If you really have evidence for all the assumptions in Bush's version, Occam is cool with that. Occam's razor is just cautioning you about the tendency to think that way without evidence.

Frequently in the course of debate, Occam's razor is invoked to discard a complex theory in favor of a simple one. The fact is, simple explanations have to be tossed out all the time.

Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics was simple. Relativity (physics) is dizzyingly complex by comparison. But Isaac Newton was wrong.

This caused Albert Einstein (physicist) to give a rebuke to Occam's Razor: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Occam's razor should never be invoked during a debate. If a person has made an unnecessary and indefensible assumption, attack the assumption itself.

If you can't, you should probably hear them out.


Nov 29, 2011

What are some favorite quotes from The Office ?

"Look, at the end of the day, apples to apples, flying at 30,000 feet, this is a paper company. And I don't want to get lost in the weeds or into a beauty contest. Convergence, viral marketing, we're going guerilla. We're taking it to the streets, while keeping an eye on the street - Wall Street. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here. In other words, it is what it is."

- Ryan


Nov 29, 2011

How can I become emotionally stronger, more positive, and build up my confidence?

Hey.

It sounds like you're depressed and anxious, which is the most commonly heard psychiatric complaint. A forum like Quora might get you some useful feedback, but can I make a suggestion?

Print out your question. You say it helps to talk to the therapist, but you only get to do that once a month. That's not very much.

I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like the treatment you're getting is not the right frequency and possibly not the right type. Depression and anxiety are among the most treatable issues, but it's got to be the right treatment for you.

Maybe once or twice a week. Something more 'immersive'. Maybe some medication. Glad you're not resorting to booze, that'll mess you up even worse.

My suggestion is to go around with that print-out to various mental health professionals, show it to them, and see if you can't work out some treatment which is effective for you. Shop around.

If money is tight, you may be able to find free support groups and such.

Kind of like a toothache, issues like this are only really painful when they don't get the right professional attention.


Nov 29, 2011

What are some examples of products that represent a great idea poorly executed?

Friendster.

Social networking with real names in 2002. They got 3 million users in the first few months, but were sunk by technical and management issues. This cleared a path for MySpace and facebook.

See

What were the key mistakes that Friendster made?

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html


Nov 29, 2011

What are some of the best pranks you have pulled?

In high school, I told my gullible chemistry lab partner that he needs to sign out a "fallopian tube" from the teacher. They're expensive so the school needs to keep track of them ... he bit ...

In my first job for the DoD, a coworker had to call a French company for some reason or other. He had heard the French really appreciate it if you ask them in French to speak English. Since I had taken french, I offered to help him out, and taught him to say, "Bonjour. Je m'appelle Dan Gross. Je travaille aux etats unis et il y'a une vache verte dans mes pantalons." (Hello, my name is Dan Gross, I work in the United States and there is a green cow in my pants.)

I siphoned out half my neighbor's above-ground swimming pool with a garden hose.


Nov 29, 2011

When your accountant says, "Your books are a mess," what specifically might she mean?

"I'm sending you a big bill."


Nov 29, 2011

What are the best deterrents to potential burglars?

In addition to the excellent suggestions others have made, put stickers of this on your doors and windows :


(feel free to print out)


Nov 29, 2011

Why do we lavish so many resources on end of life rather than enhancing the young and working-age?

Also, older people vote :

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/age-turnout-and-voteshtml.php?nr=1

Social Security and Medicare have been called the Third Rail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail) of American politics. Touch it and die.


Nov 29, 2011

What is it like to be an engineer in the Military?

This may be a bit dated, but I worked as a software engineer in 1990-1996 for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, at the very end of the Cold War. This facility originated developing sonar systems for submarines, but by the time I got there it had evolved into doing wargame simulations. Yea, just like the movie - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

I was lucky to be working through a contractor. The military tends to contract out its important work. Impressively, the military recognizes that it is a huge, inefficient bureaucracy and real work is best left to contractors.

These are not short-term contracts. Contractors are supposed to compete for bids, but really the game is rigged. The contract is generally written up so specifically that only one company can bid on it, and the status quo is maintained. So this was a long-term, stable position. Just a different color badge.

You get to work on insanely exotic hardware. Supercomputers, flight simulators, etc. DoD thinks nothing of dropping 10 million on stuff just to try it out.

There is a great deal of creative freedom - more so in the private sector. The trick is to come up with ideas and sell them to a COTR (Contracting Officer's Technical Representative). These are the people who sign off on the contracts.
You can invent your own job.

(If you work for the military, and not for a contractor, you are likely to end up being a COTR and doing paperwork rather than real engineering.)

There is a long time to get your work done. Deliverables are typically made annually. You've basically got a year to put something together. There is a lot of opportunity to learn new stuff, not much pressure.

There is a stunning amount of bullshit coming down from DoD. Pointy haired bosses hurling around TLA's and making powerpoint presentations to attract funding from the Pentagon. I was actually told to write a program to burn up Cray Supercomputer time, so that the guy who bought the computer didn't look like a dolt for wasting money.

Disclaimer : This is my own personal experience, somewhat dated, and I'm sure there is great engineering work being done by non-contractors. This was just my experience.


Nov 29, 2011

What are some of the good examples of mathematics being used as a theme in Science Fiction?

Contact by Carl Sagan features an alien message in the decimal expansion of Pi. (don't ask me how they got it in there ;) )


Nov 29, 2011

Is the answer to this question "no"?

Mu.


Nov 30, 2011

Is there any strange geological evidence that exists from between about 6000 BCE and 4000 BCE of phenomena like earthquakes, volcanos, crustal transformation, or tsunamis?

Not sure what you mean by strange, but around 5800 BC Mount Etna in Sicily appears to have blown ski-high, creating a debris avalanche and a mega-tsunami - http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027790.shtml

There is some speculation that this created the legend of Atlantis.


Nov 30, 2011

What movie trailers were the most misleading?

Awesome, awesome trailer (and music) for Battle LA :

Movie is "loud, ugly and stupid" (Ebert.) I would seriously rather watch the trailer 60 times in succession that watch that stink bomb.


Nov 30, 2011

Would a significantly strong enough telescope pointed at Earth from X light years away, be able to essentially see back in time on the surface of Earth?


Nov 30, 2011

Why does Stephen King hate what Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining?

Stephen King has stated that Kubrick didn't do justice to what King felt were the most important aspects of the book : The main character's struggle with alcoholism, the dissolution of the American family (or at least this one), and the malevolence of the hotel itself (rather than the people/ghosts in it.)

Some of this may be personal for King. Like the main character, King was a writer with a serious alcohol and cocaine problem who confessed suppressing "brutal urges" toward his daughter. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1178151/Stephen-Kings-Real-Horror-Story-How-novelists-addiction-drink-drugs-nearly-killed-him.html The book is about a good man turned bad by alcoholism; an alcoholism exploited by an unseen evil force.

The movie is about a jerk who just gets worse.


Nov 30, 2011

What is the difference between algorithm and pseudo-code?

Pseudo-code is a means to express an algorithm.

It's a somewhat fine distinction. Pseudo-code is to an algorithm as a painting of a tree is to an actual tree.


Dec 1, 2011

How will the legal recognition of gay marriage in your country positively or negatively affect your life as an individual? Please elaborate with concrete examples.

As a straight person with a gay cousin and many gay friends, I would feel a little bit less like :

A white person in Alabama in 1910, walking around with the gnawing sense that by participating in this society I am complicitous in its bigotry.


Dec 1, 2011

Should I always put the parking brake on—even when I'm parked on a flat surface?

Yes, it can also make it harder to tow ;)


Dec 2, 2011

Who is the most shameful American?

See this house?


That's in my home town of Norwich, Connecticut. It is the birthplace of a Revolutionary War General. He was a brilliant and fearless tactician, among his many accomplishments was the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, helping to win the Battle of Saratoga (where he got injured), and too many others to mention.

What's this crappy ranch house doing there? Where's the statue, why wasn't the house preserved (or at least rebuilt) in it's original form?


You probably guessed it - this is the birthplace of non other than Benedict Arnold.

After getting into some political disputes with other colonists, he defected to the British. Secretly at first. He got himself appointed to West Point so that he could surrender it to the British (unsuccessfully). It was named Fort Arnold at the time, after him.

Next the weasel joined the British Forces openly. He led the attack against New London and Groton, two seaport towns 12 miles south of Norwich. These two towns were essentially part of Norwich; connected by the Thames River and a good road, Norwich had daily business with New London and Groton. He attacked his own neighbors, the very people he grew up with. Much of New London was burnt down.

After the war, the colonists welcomed British to come visit and even settle in America. But not this jackass. He would have been shot on sight.

When I grew up there, there was no way to find this place if you didn't know exactly where to look. His name appeared nowhere, at all. Folklore had it that it brought bad luck to say his name.

(A small plaque has since been put there.)


Dec 2, 2011

What movies were made for the express purpose of discrediting a person or idea?

Ah schadenfreude ...

Overnight, a documentary about Troy Duffy, writer and director of the Boondock Saints.

This guy hit the script-writer's jackpot while working at a bar. Miramax offered 15 million to make the movie, let him direct it, give him final say in casting, final cut, let his band do the soundtrack AND to buy the bar where he worked and split it with him.

Duffy turns out to be an abusive, alcoholic ass-clown. Loses everything. When Boondock becomes a cult hit on DVD, he gets none of that money. Here’s a trailer :


Dec 2, 2011

Who are the most useless people today?

Harold Camping, the dipshit who convinced all those people the end was indeed nigh ...


Dec 3, 2011

What is the best social media approach to get fans and supporters to actively engage in original content?

One simple way to attract facebook interaction is to pose a question. It can be about anything, really. (I am not referring to their polling thingie, just a regular old question.)

Another is to say something controversial (without trolling.)

A controversial question combines the two.

They key is this : You're not trying to get them to listen to you. You're trying to get them to talk to you.

Provoke them, strike a nerve, make them choose sides. Sit back and let them go at it with each other. Your EdgeRank (facebook ranking) will climb as a result.

It's a new way of thinking, from the old days when organizations were an information pump. The flow has reversed.


Dec 4, 2011

In chess why is the dominant piece called queen and not king? Aren't kings more powerful historically?

The king can't move as far, it can't check your opponent, and it can't be sacrificed.


Dec 4, 2011

Should we use Django / Python for a non-profit car sharing website? (there are hardware units in each vehicle that communicates to the server)

What Andrey Khavryuchenko said - it's all about availability of developers, both now and in the future (if you intend to grow.)

If you are really worried about maximizing developer availability in the future (like if your current dev takes off), it makes sense to go with the most popular languages.

This would be Ruby On Rails or even PHP. See Why is Django not as popular as Ruby on Rails?

Otherwise just let the dev work in whatever s/he wants.


Dec 4, 2011

What mysteries still remain in the world which may conceivably be answered by science in this century?

Does the Higgs Boson exist?

We may actually get an answer to this in eight days (12/12/11) , thanks to data gathered from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Higgs Boson is sometimes called "The God particle." It is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics which attempts to unify the four forces of nature : the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity.

Physicists the world over are holding their breath for what could be the biggest news in science in 50 years. Thanks to Jay Wacker for alerting Quora to this : Higgs Boson: Higgs Update Coming...


Dec 4, 2011

What are some lifestyle changes that save money?

Purchase, rather than lease your Gulf Stream Jet.

Leasing can be just as expensive as outright ownership, as you still incur the cost of maintenance, insurance, pilot salary, hangar space, etc.

When you purchase outright, the aircraft is yours to sell when you wish to upgrade to the next model that rolls out. Unlike an automobile, these aircraft tend to hold their value over time.

Don't fall for the slick lease-pitch from your local jet dealer.


Dec 4, 2011

Should a company hire a female web developer? And why?

You should hire based on ability, not gender.

You should probably reflect on what prejudices are lurking in your mind which led to such a question. Prejudice is not only unfair to prospective employees, it puts you at a competitive disadvantage because you might miss talent.

You might even miss a superstar like Rebekah Cox, who designed Quora and big chunks of facebook. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-creative-people/2011/rebekah-cox-quora

Seriously. Get a grip. My bearded friend here perhaps puts it more succinctly :


Dec 6, 2011

What do mediocre people in Silicon Valley do? In the land of obsessing over “top talent”, “superstar developers”, and “near geniuses”, is there any place for “just average”?

PowerPoint.


Dec 6, 2011

What's a more elegant way to say "Powered by"?

"Floats on." ;)


Dec 7, 2011

If you genetically engineer a new conscious life form, would you be their "god"?

Yes. Like most important questions, this has been addressed in south park : http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153492/a-god-among-sea-men


Dec 8, 2011

Does the form of compensation in a startup determine how much software engineers enjoy their work?

I think what attracts engineers to start-ups is the freedom to create something important and also to own a big piece of that thing - in that order.

The potential of a big payout is a kind of joyful side effect. They are really in it to put a dent in the universe, but they also don't want to make somebody else rich and not themselves should it take off.

So equity is more important, and comes second to creative freedom without a lot of bullshit impediments. (PS : Have a good answer for when they ask about Equity Dilution, developers are becoming hip to the trick of giving them a 20% stake which evaporates by sleight of hand ...)


Dec 8, 2011

What's the best thing someone could say about another person to result in the most happiness or satisfaction?

"S/he's a good person to have around."


Dec 9, 2011

What are some good movies about corruption?

An amateur break-in (with flashlights blazing). A piece of scotch tape discovered by a security guard. A cover-up. An enemies list. 18 minutes of blanked tape. An American president resigns in disgrace.

Three great movies were made about the fall of Nixon in the Watergate scandal. Mircea Goia mentioned two, All The President's Men (about the two reporters who broke the story) and Frost/Nixon (about the interviewer who got Nixon to admit to breaking the law on camera.) Both are fantastic and I'd like to add a third from the POV of the president himself - visually stunning, with brilliant acting by Anthony Hopkins - simply titled

Nixon:
Streaming (for now) on YouTube:

I expect that will come down eventually, here's the trailer:


Dec 9, 2011

What does “Rosebud” mean in Citizen Kane?

Aside from the rumour that 'rosebud' refers to William Randolph Hearst's pet name for his mistress' clitoris (c'mon, we're grownups, we can say it!), it was literally the name printed on Kane's childhood sled :


Metaphorically, it refers to the life Kane left behind at this pivotal moment (when he's holding 'Rosebud'). Wealth has suddenly been discovered in his family and he is sent away from his home to start a new life of wealth and power.


His new fortune has a ruinous effect on him. He becomes corrupted, morally bankrupt, he dies friendless and alone, surrounded by a staggering mass of meaningless possessions.

His dying word, "Rosebud", is an expression of regret for the turn his life took when he gave up his sled, his family, his values. It is a yearning for the meaning and potential forever lost in this moment.


Dec 9, 2011

What are the best bus scenes on film?

Spoiler alert :

Ghost World is an amazing coming of age story of two high school girls. It is fun to watch, biting, perceptive and deftly avoids cheap sentimentality.

There is also a parting paranormal touch in the last scene. Earlier in the movie, we are introduced to this apparently crazy old guy who sits at a bus stop - where the bus no longer comes. He never seems to learn and is always there. Dressed, it seems, as if for a special occasion :


One girl tells him, "The bus doesn't come here any more." He responds quite firmly, "You don't know what you're talking about."

There is a bus - but it's no ordinary bus. As the plot develops, the girl on the left decides to stay in her home town, get a job and an apartment. The girl on the right ... can't bring herself to do that. She realizes her life lies beyond this suburban town. Only then does she sit on that bench. And the bus comes for her.

It's a bus that comes when you are truly ready to leave.

This scene is all the more poignant because there isn't a trace of anything other-wordly in the rest of the movie.

(This must-see film launched the career of Scarlett Johannsen)



Dec 12, 2011

Is there any better editor, like VIM in ubuntu that can be used instead of Terminal (one that come with ubuntu by default)?

geany is my favorite editor; it's fairly lightweight but has good support for lots of different programming/mark-up languages. Auto collapsing blocks comes in handy especially when dealing w/ nested divs ...


Dec 13, 2011

Is there a way to block all Zynga apps (or other games) on Facebook?

No.

It has to be per game (FB doesn't aggregrate apps by publisher; in fact any attempt to do so could be easily circumvented - unless FB build a walled garden.) Fortunately, Zinga doesn't make that many and I blocked them long ago. Occasionally a new one pops up, but having to block it is infinitely preferable to an Apple-esque walled garden approach.)


Dec 14, 2011

How did Einstein conclude that the speed of light is constant?

In addition to Steve Denton's answer, the constancy of the speed of light had been confirmed by repeated experiments beginning in 1887 in the Michelson-Morley experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment. This was a clever setup using mirrors to form an interferometer. The speed of light was then measured parallel to the spin of the earth, in both directions (towards dawn and sunset.) If light were travelling at a constant speed through the aether, the two measurements should have been different.

No such difference was ever found, even though the interferometer was sensitive enough to detect it.

This was the real smoking gun that inspired Einstein to attempt a radical remodelling of space and time.


Dec 14, 2011

Can a semantic engine as Open Calais automatically tell if a sentence is a question or not?

If this is all you want, a semantic engine may be overkill.

Questions usually end in a question mark :)

If you want to catch tweets where the question mark has been omitted, another reasonable heuristic is that that first word is from this list : "What, How, Why, Where, , Does, Do , Should, When, Am, Is, Are, Can, Could, Will, Might".

This shd be < an hour of coding for any developer. I'll gladly do it for $5,000 :)


Dec 14, 2011

Why do some people only wear one glove?

So they can still use the (capacitive) touch screen on their smartphone.


Dec 14, 2011

How does fire burn in zero gravity?

Yes - fire burns at a snail's pace without gravity (thanks to Pete Van der Goore, see ... http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html).

In the presence of gravity, the hot gas produced by combustion is less dense, so it rises up and fresh air rushes in from beneath. This brings in a constant stream of oxygen to feed the fire. In zero gravity the fire gets a comparative trickle of oxygen through molecular diffusion.

The reason a flame leans toward your finger may be due to the Bernoulli Effect.


Dec 15, 2011

What have been some of the most even wars or battles in history?

The God-awful Eastern Front, the most costly conflict in human history.

Two gargantuan military powers (each with little regard for loss of life on either side) just went at it with everything they had. Soviet losses ~ 10 million, German losses ~ 5 million.

Each side had tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft. Arguably the battle turned only on German tactical errors (especially Hitler's refusal to allow tactical retreat), some bad luck with weather, and code breaking.


Dec 17, 2011

Why is being homosexual often considered a lifestyle?

It's complicated.

I think it began as a clumsy attempt at acceptance on the part of straight people. 'Lifestyle' is a neutral word - not a big deal. We all have a right to our lifestyle, right? I'm referring here to the early 70's, when people were experimenting with different sorts of 'lifestyles' (open marriages, communal living, etc.)

I really think people meant well by it, and didn't realize they were smuggling in the assumption that sexual orientation is a matter of choice.

The term has since been co-opted by bigots. The bigot first wants to deny that homosexuality is a natural, inborn trait in many people - to trivialize orientation as a choice. Once they've done that, they can argue with the choice and (especially tragic in the case of many teens) attempt to reverse it.


Dec 17, 2011

What are some of the most surprising (or interesting) bits of movie trivia that most people don't know?

This guy :


(Burt Ward) wanted to do this TV show ...


... so he turned down an offer for the leading role in this little indie film :


Dec 17, 2011

In what order did Quora users learn the programming languages that they know?

(years are approximate cuz I don't wanna think that hard.)

1982-ish Basic: Apple II, Timex Sinclair, PDP 1170.

1983-ish 6502 Assembly, Z80 assembly, FORTRAN, Pascal

1984-ish Forth (which was really cool, cuz it ran fast due to its reverse-polish nature)

1990 : Lisp (and Star-LISP).

1991 : C

1992 : I wrote my own ! Called Lexicon, a domain-specific language for wargames written for the dept of offense.

1993 : C++

and then the Web happened, and the usual zoo of web languages came after.


Dec 17, 2011

Why are so many adults lonely even though they were so social when they were younger?

From personal experience,

You may live in the wrong place now.

When I was young, I was surrounded by other people with my interests due to school. There was an automatic selection/grouping mechanism at work which surrounded me with people I could connect with.

Then I got older and lost that.
At first, I lived in a boring small town in the country. My hometown. I was lonely.
Then I moved to the city. It was too compressed, too young and transient (Boston.) Despite being surrounded by people, I was lonely.
Then I moved to the north shore of Boston - Salem. Not so crowded. I met my kind of people - creative types - artists, musicians, people my age, people not my age.
I was no longer lonely.

Keep looking, I'd say.


Dec 17, 2011

What are the most inspiring poems ever written?

I used to wonder,

Why doesn't somebody do something about it?

Then I realized :

I am somebody.


Dec 18, 2011

If you could today send a tweet (140 characters or less) to yourself back when you were graduating from high school, what would you say?

"You won't believe the phones."


Dec 19, 2011

The theory of relativity was initially met with skepticism, as do all radical ideas. When did it first prove itself worthy of acceptance?

It's my understanding the Special Relativity was generally accepted within 15-20 years, but General Relativity was much more mathematically abstract and really didn't become universally accepted by mainstream physicists until the discovery of such exotic objects as quasars and black holes in the 1960's. It was also in this decade that the mathematics was rendered more tractable and electronic computers were of assistance. I'll try to return with sources ...


Dec 19, 2011

What message should we send to aliens to prove we have high intelligence?

Pi in binary (any three symbols for dot, '1' and '0') should be easy to figure out ...

11.001001000011111101101010


Dec 19, 2011

Why does Chrome use so much memory?

Each tab in Chrome runs as a separate process - this is the key difference between Chrome and other browsers. This makes Chrome more robust (one page can't bring the browser down) but it can also eat up more RAM.

You can tell Chrome to launch in a single process if you want, see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-cool-tricks-to-put-some-more-sheen-on-google-chrome/


Dec 19, 2011

Are the 2012 Republican presidential candidates total clowns, or am I the victim of liberal brainwashing?

Clowns.


Dec 25, 2011

What unnecessary barriers should President Obama's Startup America initiative identify and remove to help high-growth startups?

The centers of innovation - Silicon Valley, Boston, MA, etc., can be very expensive places to live.

Young entrepreneurs would benefit greatly by having "office crashpads" to have a roof over their heads and a place to work. Some basic services like Internet service and health care.


Dec 29, 2011

Are 'the youth' really fed up with iPhone/Android and turning to Windows Phones as claimed by Nokia?

I think there is some youthful rebellion against both the draconian control of Apple and the fragmentation/glitchiness of Android.

But this won't make youth turn to Windows. MS doesn't know how to talk to young people. I mean - look at the name. Windows doesn't mean anything. It's this genericized, decades-old term that just fades into beige. It's not even clear that it's a proper noun in conversation until some context falls into place.

This is the work of MBA's trying to stay "on brand" who don't get the youth culture. Or any culture. A kid who buys this has to say, "it's running Windows - not like the PC but a phone version." If you can't even come up with a name ... it's like showing up to a rave in a suit and tie. Hopeless.

"Oh! But the outlook integration!" Suit and tie.

Metro PC would have been a great name and indicated it works nice with your PC. Or X-Phone. Anything. Else.

The kicker of it is, Mango is a great OS. It's possibly the best one out there right now. It has a fluid, well thought out social-centric design, really facile tiling, reviewers love it. Nobody cares.

Am I really saying a name can kill a great product? I guess I am. I don't see how MS can talk young people into anything when they can't even start the conversation.


Dec 29, 2011

Why do people on Quora often start their answers by informing the questioner they are asking the wrong question?

The question you intend to ask is perhaps, "Why do people often
ask the wrong question?" (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

As Yishan Wong points out, the question is usually a near-miss (unless the question is trivial.)

In fact, science and philosophy can be seen as the practice of refining questions.


Jan 1, 2012

How did Hitler reconcile his own appearance with his racial ideologies?

He never tried, as far as I know.

There was a common joke, in Nazi Germany—which had to be whispered into a trusted friend's ear because it would get you shot—"The ideal German should be as blonde as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering and as chaste as Roehm."

Hitler was certainly no ubermensch. Terrible teeth, drooping shoulders, explosive, vain and effeminate (according to Carl Jung.) Jung posited that it was precisely Hitler's rather pathetic appearance that captured the imagination of the German people.

His adoration of Nordic ideals did not appear self-serving. His fiery oration combined with his weak appearance subliminally mirrored Germany itself: pathetic, humiliated, enraged, full of hidden power.


Jan 1, 2012

Is it sensible for me to still feel an obligation to avoid purchasing items from companies that benefited from Jewish slave labor under the Nazi regime?

Disclosure : German/Jewish descent here, many of my ancestral relatives got trapped in Germany, were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and sent to death camps in the east. I've been able to track down about 50 of them.

Answer : No. That war was horrible. For Jews, for Russians, for Japanese, for Germans, for millions. It was a wounding of all humanity.

A wound needs to heal.

Sure, we hunt down the most culpable. We do our best to return art, gold and other property. But we can never set it right.

We can, however, heal. To heal is to outlive the wound.


Jan 1, 2012

If I worked for a company for over a year but without a non-compete is there anything stopping me from starting a company that competes directly?

Yes. Ethics.

It's not a cool move. There's so many other things to do, why turn around and slap the company that hired and trusted you?

If you need a better reason than Karma, it damages your reputation. The people at your present company will move on some day, and join your professional network. You don't want the reputation as a person who's cut-throat.


Jan 1, 2012

If I have a new idea for a software project, what is the best way to start; should I start a new company and make the idea true or look for a sponsor company or institution that can support me financial wise?

Nobody is going to steal your idea. You're lucky if they listen to your idea for more than five seconds.

The best (and only) way to start is build a prototype.

If you can't do that, find someone to do it for you.
Failing that, you're dead. Good ideas get built.


Jan 1, 2012

What are some good examples of highbrow humor? What jokes and stories should be in one's repertoire if, for example, they were attending a New Year's Eve party with the faculty at a local university?

The bartender says, "Sorry. We don't serve neutrinos faster than light here."

A neutrino walks into a bar.


Jan 2, 2012

Sexting seems like a huge problem in America's schools. When it comes to middle school and high school students, what should be the law against sexting?

The kids are alright.

The media interest in this sort of thing is kinda creepy.

Leave it alone, I say.


Jan 2, 2012

Will anything again consume as much of a percentage of the world's annual productive capacity as World War 2?

A good candidate is the coming collision with Peak Oil.

We are at or near the maximum rate we can pump oil out of the earth, no matter how much more we drill. All the major reserves have been located (which is the reason we're starting to drill in weird places like a mile below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico - sorry, BP.)

At current consumption rates, we're totally out of oil in 50-100 years. But we'll run short of it long before then.

So a number of things can happen, all of them expensive on a WWII scale.

Oil dependent countries may go to war (like the USA and China.)

Industrial society may be massively re-engineered to make it less oil dependent - especially farming and personal transportation. For instance, biodiverse, local farmlands that aren't reliant on fertilizer or presticides, a return to a village structure where walking is the primary mode of transportation.

We may make up the difference by building 10's of thousands of nuclear generators.

We may opt for a sharp drop in global population.

We may do nothing and the system will crash, causing famine, war, and the general collapse of industrial civilization.


Jan 2, 2012

What is the best way to rebound from a failed startup?

Mark the mistakes. Spend some time reflecting on what went wrong. Wrong partners? Too slow to execute? Be especially hard on yourself, what bad moves did you make.

Start a new one based on your hard-won wisdom.

Don't be discouraged. Bill Gates' first product was some traffic counting piece of crap. Zuck turned down a million bucks for a pandora-like music player, it flopped, and the million dollar offer disappeared. Most success stories have their origins in failure.


Jan 2, 2012

Would Adele be more or less successful if she were more attractive?

Dude, she's beautiful and one of the great talents of her generation.


Jan 3, 2012

Why does Fox News claim to be "fair and balanced"?

If Fox doesn't say it, nobody will.


Jan 3, 2012

You just received 20K (not a fortune, not a tiny amount, either) and have no pressing needs (no medical issues, etc). You've already maxed out your 401K plan and have already donated a considerable sum to charity. In THIS economy, what do you do with it? Is there any remotely likely way to make it grow if you're not an expert (or even if you are)?

Stocks haven't seen growth in 11 years. I'd put it there.


Jan 3, 2012

What are some great no-free-lunch pieces of wisdom?

"if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass a-hoppin" ... Raising Arizona.


Jan 3, 2012

How do I file a software patent in the U.S.?

To add to Cynthia's answer, you should also be aware of the (still rather newish) Provisional Patent Application available in the US.

This allows you to write a technical white paper on your own, submit it, and you are given a year to file the actual patent application. It costs about $200 and was introduced so that inventors could protect their ideas while they are in the process of raising to funds so they can afford a patent attorney.

There are some pitfalls here, you need to make sure your 'claims' are properly defined in the provisional application. It's best to at least to a consult with an attorney to make sure the provisional is adequate.


Jan 3, 2012

How has Steve Jobs influenced the world we live in?

He united technology with beauty on a global scale.


Jan 4, 2012

What are the best-known movie heroes who are played by African-American actors?


Going back a ways, Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. This belongs on your bucket-list.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062376/

The first African-American actor to become a household name as the star of films both successful and critically acclaimed. Many African-American actors in the next generation credit him as their inspiration.


Jan 4, 2012

What are some quintessential first-world problems?

A pixel just went out on the in-flight screen I was watching, making it impossible for me to enjoy the documentary on starvation in central Africa.

Just great.


Jan 4, 2012

What can I do now while I can see to prepare myself for the possibility of being blind in the future?

I have no personal experience with this, so this is just an addendum to more personally informed answers like Jenn Cab's. (Though I was partially blinded for a year as a child.)

You may also want to get in contact with http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org.
This is the work of Daniel Kish, who dedicates himself to using sound to replace vision (echolocation.) He is working on new ways to teach this skill and new technologies to enable it.

I have offered up free programming services to this organization and encourage other Quora techies to do the same.,


Jan 4, 2012

What are the five worst words with which to begin a Quora answer?

"Sorry to tell you but ..."


Jan 4, 2012

Is there another word for the phrase "frictionless design"? (for technology)

Simple.

In French, the word "facile" seems perfect. It directly translates as "easy", but it has nuance of effective structure (as in facility).


Jan 4, 2012

What is the name of the feeling that we feel after eating a dessert when you just eat your food?

Check anxiety.


Jan 4, 2012

What is the name of a sphere that is turned inside out?

Sphere.


Jan 7, 2012

Which Quora answers do you wish you had come up with?

Definitely the epic answer Michael Wolfe gave to Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?.

"No, shut up."

What is so great about this answer is it is as funny as it is true. It also does something that only the very best answers do : rise above the question to address a deeper truth. (In this case, it points out the tendency people have to take a useful, simple idea and bury it under heaps of 'improvements.')


Jan 7, 2012

What are the main flaws in Objectivism?

Oh boy. I am breaking my own rule of never arguing with Randians.

It doesn't exist. There really is no coherent expression of her philosophy anywhere. Rand rambles, utters inanities like "existence exists", quotes her own fictional characters, and is really just way over her head as a political philosopher.

Philosophies of 'rational self interest' are competently laid out by many other thinkers.
Rand's failure to pull herself together aside, we can summarize her views "The Individual good should trump the Collective good in all circumstances."
It is a very seductive viewpoint because it so clean. Nobody owes anybody anything, people are entitled to whatever they make, and if your house burns down it's not my problem. The problem is,
It's too clean. When agents acting in their rational self-interest begin to interact with each other, something very unexpected happens. They screw themselves over. Not each other - themselves. Game theorists and economists point to the The Prisoner's Dilemma :

I'll just try to summarize it : The Prisoner's Dilemma shows that there are situations that force us to be Collectivists, that is - the individual is better off acting against his interest locally in pursuit of some greater global collective payoff. If this seems like nonsense - it should, it's very counterintuitive. It's really worth studying the The Prisoner's Dilemma.
I'll take a stab at a simple example. 50 people live on a island. On the island is a fresh water spring, but there is a 3 ton rock on top of it. If the rock could be removed, everybody would have fresh water to drink.
Nobody can move it alone, it takes dozens of people tugging with a rope. Your individual contribution won't make a difference - one person less and the rock still moves. It is not in your rational self interest to help.
"Ah hah!", says the Objectivist, "But we're smarter than that! We simply all agree beforehand, we'll all pull the rock and we all get the water. Thus an agreement is in force which compels us to pull, making it a rational choice."

Yup. Such agreements are called Governments. They re-allocate resources against people's self-interest in pursuit of big goals like reservoirs, roads, dams, defense.

The fact is, the Individual Good cannot be untangled from the Collective Good.While the extremes - pure capitalism on one end of the spectrum and pure communism on the other - can be very seductive because they are so pure, reality rejects this purity.
The result is we are always (imperfectly) balancing the Individual and the Collective good. This is the reason every economy on earth is really a mixed economy somewhere on that spectrum. The most successful are likely close to a good balance.
Rand wrote, "Either individual rights are recognized in a society, or they are not recognized. They cannot be half-recognized."
Actually we are compelled to half-recognize them in a world with big rocks to move.


Jan 8, 2012

How do I make sure my engineer spends more time working and less time reading Twitter or Hacker News? He gets distracted very easily. After working 15 minutes, he goes on Digg and starts browsing pictures. He barely gets anything done.

The key question is - is he really not getting things done?

You say he knows how to do and build everything, which hints that he has indeed built stuff.
Is he simply working in a way which looks inefficient, but is actually the guy out producing other engineers?
That happens a lot. Some really good technical people have a kind of ADHD-ish tendency to switch focus. It looks like goofing off. It often is.
So you see him browsing reddit, and there's important work to be done. And of course, you think : The work isn't done yet because the guy can't focus.

But if you look deeper, you may realize that nobody else can do this task because this guy is incredibly good when he's "on". He can do in two hours what other engineers fail to accomplish in two weeks.

And you see him browsing reddit and desperately want to tighten that screw.

For people like this (call them Intermittent Superheros), it's important to realize they work in super-productive bursts. Any attempt to interfere with their self-scheduling will convert them to Mere Mortals. The goofing off is actually a preparation for hyper-focus.

It can be unnerving to watch. So it's best not to watch them.


Jan 8, 2012

Why do I sneeze once or twice every afternoon at roughly the same time each day?

Is the afternoon sun coming through a window? You may have the common trait of sneezing in the presence of sunlight - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex


Jan 8, 2012

Does culture follow media or the other way around?

I think this is one of those dichotomous questions that needs to be unasked; culture and media follow each other in a reinforcing cycle where it's impossible to untangle cause and effect.


Jan 10, 2012

What are examples of egregious movie misconceptions and exaggerations?

You can drown in 20 seconds. Somebody holds somebody's head underwater - you can hold your breath while they 'drown', 2 or 3 times over.A

A car that goes off a cliff will always explode. It's actually gas vapor that's explosive - you can put out a match in liquid gasoline. If the tank is nearly empty you might get a small explosion, or you might get a big explosion *later* when the gas has leaked and is evaporating.

The only way an explosive shell can hurt you is if it blows you into the air. Nobody is ever taken out by shrapnel from an explosion 20 feet away (the way they are actually designed to work.)


Jan 10, 2012

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Waterfall development : A big schedule is pulled out of thin air and thrown over the wall at developers. Middle managers break it up into chunks and pass it down. The problem is a) the schedule has not been informed by engineers, b) the schedule doesn't evolve as more information comes in (some things were easier, some were harder) and b2) if the project is going to be late, nobody realizes it until it's too late to do anything about it (like cut features.)

Death by metrics : Managers will measure productivity by number of lines checked in or number of bugs fixed. This encourages lots of code with lots of bugs.

Oversteering : When it becomes clear that the project is going to be late, managers do things that make it later : Pressure programmers to work more hours, add people, bang harder on their metrics.

Feature creep : This especially happens when Marketing wants to slip in some feature so they can do a demo.

Premature QA : Unleashing testers too early in development. Because, you know, the sooner you find the bugs the sooner you fix them! Result : Testers are banging on unfinished code that engineers already know doesn't work, creating enormous noise. Testers are also taking up engineering time learning how things are supposed to work (because there is no doc yet.)

Bozo explosion : (We can't blame managers for everything!) When companies get big, they start to hire so-so people, who then hire even worse people, until you've pretty much got an idiot farm.


Jan 10, 2012

Is there any difference between the words “patronize” and “condescend”?

I have always taken patronize to mean a specific form of condescension.

From the latin 'Pater' for 'father', 'patronize' implies assuming the tone of a parent speaking to a child. Paternalistic condescension.

Simply condescending might be, "Nice painting, I'm glad you've got a way to keep busy."

Patronizing would be, "Nice effort. When I was at the stage you are now, I took the time to really study perspective, composition and color balance. That's if you want to take it seriously, though. Not everyone does."

In the field of psychology called Transactional Dynamics, this sort of thing is studied in-depth.

In short, it's an incredibly fast way to piss people off.


Jan 10, 2012

Have cell phones ruined the horror movie genre?

Nah.

Two generations of movie heroines have met their demise because they can't seem to kick off their high heel shoes before running through the cemetary.

Hundreds of families have moved into houses, seen that the walls are crying blood and thought, "Let's sleep HERE. What's the worst that can happen?"

Comparitively, a cell phone is a rather minor thing to do away with. Especially since it runs out of charge, is easily broken and isn't waterproof.


Jan 11, 2012

How do experienced engineers at startups avoid stagnation due to the overabundance of operational issues?

I had this happen some years ago, and stumbled upon a solution quite by accident :

Plan a two-month leave of absence, six months from now :

You're going to be gone for two months. As in off-the-grid, in-the-desert, for-real gone.

This forces the issue - The company never wanted to make its day-to-day reliant on any one person, it just happened. They always intended to fix it, it was just never urgent. Now it is. There's six months to do knowledge-transfer, etc.

As the big day comes, confess that you're actually going to do some new development on your trip, sans internet connection. You want to put together some new stuff to show. Get their input on things they want to see.

When you return, hopefully, a new status quo will have emerged, where the company feels they don't need you to fire-fight, and is once again excited about what new work you've got underway.


Jan 11, 2012

How would you describe your life in one sentence?

Look out world - once I find my pants ...


Jan 12, 2012

A person I normally respect posted this image on his Facebook wall. How should I respond?

Let it slide.

I often apply the 'symmetry test' to such situations :

If it was a woman doing the posting, and the post was something like, "I once met a man who listened and was emotionally mature ..." would it be offensive?

Nah - she's just venting after hitting a bump on the Love Road.

"But that's different because an oppressed minority is - "

No, shut up, it isn't.

Let it slide.


"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy." -- Henry Kissinger


Jan 12, 2012

Should you friend your CEO on Facebook?

No.

Jesus.


Jan 12, 2012

What is the greatest transformation of our world that you have witnessed in your lifetime?


Jan 12, 2012

How is the information for each pixel stored in binary?

It varies; it's perhaps instructive to look at it in increasing complexity :

In the beginning, was the bitmap. This is for black and white (or black and green, or any two colors). Each pixel was a single bit - 1 and 0 corresponding to the two colors.

For an image of 16x16 pixels, you'd have a string of 256 bits. (You would probably first have some header information giving dimensions, so the program knows how many more bits to scan and where to break each row.) A .BMP file is structured this way.

Then came color. On a color display, there are actually three numbers for each pixel, corresponding to Red, Green and Blue (usually) intensity. (Note - this is an artifact of the anatomical structure of the human eye - 3 different types of receptor cones).

For example, the "color depth" (number of available intensities) for each of Red, Green, Blue may be 256. So that's three bytes per pixel. So we follow the same strategy as for a bitmap, except each pixel is now 3x8=24 bits. This is called a pixmap.

This is the most general and basic way that arbitrary images are stored. There are more exotic schemes for particular types of images; for example : if an image is composed of lots of straight lines a scheme called Stroked Vector Graphics can be used, which is essentially a line-drawing program. I won't go into those special cases any further.

OK, back to pixmaps. The next step in complexity has to do with data compression. Pixmaps can get really big.

So the simplest thing to do is to compress it using something like the pkzip algorithm. This is essentially what a .gif file is, a compressed pixmap. The .gif is decompressed into its original pixmap and then rendered. A common mistake when the net was young was to try to pkzip a gif file. It doesn't get any smaller because it's already compressed.

A key distinction here is that the pixmap is restored to exactly its original form. This is called lossless compression.

It is possible to get much better compression (10x and more) if we relax the restriction that the pixmap must be with perfect accuracy. There are a bunch of cheats we can using our knowledge of vision that are barely visible but assist in greater compression. This is called lossy compression. JPG files are structured this way.

Disclaimer : This is only intended as a high level description; actual image types vary in various implementation details, especially the header information,


Jan 14, 2012

What time-honored platitudes annoy Quora users most?

"Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door."

No, they won't. They'll say "nice mouse trap but I already have one."


Jan 14, 2012

If cats could talk, what would they say?

"The service in this place sucks."


Jan 15, 2012

Is it true that our eyes see only those things which we know?

Agree with User, especially his point about seeing things for the first time as a child. That's pretty much a knock-out punch to that idea.

I've heard that tale about natives not being able to see ships for the first time. It's certainly apocryphal or at least a huge exaggeration. Sure, they may not notice its approach, unaccustomed as they were to anything of interest happening out at sea. They might not even notice a fleet as it approaches.

But once it's close and clear enough, somebody certainly uttered their native-tongue-equivalent of, "Whoa. What the fuck is that?"


Jan 15, 2012

What are good ways of quantifying code quality?

There is none, and perhaps never will be (pending some major break-throughs in AI).

Just as there is no metric for the quality of prose.

As with prose, you can automate tests for any number of bad things :
Bugs, complexity, lack of modularization, etc.

So you can often detect bad code easily, but good code can only be detected by a set of experienced human eyeballs, who will often disagree, and whose aesthetic criteria change over time.


Jan 16, 2012

What is the purpose of the bread that restaurants give you before they take your order?

Some ideas :

People are grumpy when they're hungry. Here is an interesting study which shows that judges rulings are partially dependent on how hungry they are : http://www.economist.com/node/18557594 All of our perceptions can be tainted by an unmet need like hunger; especially when we can see other people joyfully munching away. So if the restaurant is a little noisy, the service a little slow, the menu lacks a favorite item - all of these things can get amplified. The person walks out with this diffuse sense of "meh, i don't like that place so much." Of course, if the kitchen is backed up and the order takes an hour to come out, this can reach yelpable levels.

We digest alcohol differently on an empty stomach. Alcohol profits exceed food profits in lots of places. Most people have heard "don't drink on an empty stomach" and assume the food serves to dilute the alcohol. It's actually much more drastic than that. There is a valve at the bottom of the stomach which stays open until you swallow food. On an empty stomach, your GI is in "liquid processing mode" - so that water and other drink are passed directly to your small intestines for rapid absorption. The presence of even a few bites of food closes the valve. Bread is ideal booze-food because it absorbs liquid like a sponge. So serving bread reduces the drunkenness of patrons and encourages an extra round or two.

Your order is taken while you're still hungry. Your order is usually taken before the bread has had a chance to reduce your hunger, so reducing your appetite doesn't reduce profits much. Dessert probably takes a hit.

Bread is often a signature dish. Red Lobster is a pretty crappy seafood place (are they still around?), frozen everything (but the lobster). But their cheddar cheese-bread is *awesome* and I had a couple of friends who went there for that reason.

To summarize, losing a potential dessert order is a small price to pay for a clientele which is happier, more patient, buying more drinks - oh. and clearing their table faster :)


Jan 16, 2012

Is a "lie by omission" really lying?

Any deliberate deception is a lie.


Jan 16, 2012

Where can I access free WiFi in Salem, MA?

The Gulu Gulu cafe offers free wifi and doesn't mind if you hang out for 5 hours after ordering a cup of coffee. Other cafes also offer wifi but are more mindful of hang-time.


Jan 16, 2012

What is Salem, MA known for?

The Salem Witch Trials. This has been turned into a tourist attraction, strangely enough. Salem is home to kitchy shops selling witch-paraphenalia, is home to pagans, neo-pagans, and many witch groups.


Jan 16, 2012

What is parking like in Salem, MA?

A little tight, on a workday. But there's a trick - there is a metered lot at 284 Essex St that tourists don't know about.


Jan 16, 2012

What is nightlife like in Salem, MA?

Remarkably vibrant for such a small town. Salem benefits from lots of tourists, Salem State College, and bands coming up from Boston and Cambridge.

Hot spots are Taven In the Square, Gulu Gulu Cafe, Rockefellas, Murphy's, and many others, all walkable from each other.


Jan 16, 2012

When arcades were very popular, how long would a dollar last?

A dollar could last 3 hours or longer.

Some games, like Vanguard and Asteroids give you extra lives at certain score increments. So once you got past a certain skill level you could play until you hit a slump.

Certain games could also be 'hacked'. For example, in Asteroids - leave one asteroid and don't shoot it. Spend the rest of the time shooting the little spaceships that come out. The big score for that will rapidly rack up free lives.

Pacman allowed for perfect strategy : take the turns before you reach them, and faithfully follow the correct sequence and you can go all the way through to the end.

There were also a common hardware glitch, it only worked in air conditioned environments or otherwise dry air. By shuffling your feet against the carpet, holding a quarter in your hand and touch the metal plate in the front - the machine would go *zorch* and boot up with free credits.

Down to your last quarter? You can cash it in for 5 nickels and pound em out with a hammer until they were the size of a quarter.

OK, so you're out of quarters now. Check all the coin slots.

Nothing? Go up to a newbie playing Asteroids. "Give me 20 minutes on that game and I'll leave you with 15 extra lives."

Ah, 1982. *sigh


Jan 16, 2012

Cambridge, MA: What are good ways to get to Inman Square from MIT without a car?

50 cc motor-scooter. Legal to park on sidewalks. No insurance, registration required. (technically you need a driver's license but no cop is going to pull you over and ask for it.) Lock that thing up tight - I got two stolen.


Jan 17, 2012

Linkedin: What would you pay to have your Linkedin Profile optimized?

Zilch here too; but you may be running into some "Selection Bias."

Quorans are among the most net-savvy people on earth;

I'll bet there are plenty of older executives who would pay a hefty sum for this service.


Jan 17, 2012

Would you pay $10 to watch a live concert stream in your home?

Totally. Especially if it were a local concert that I had friends at, but couldn't attend myself.


Jan 17, 2012

Will Wikipedia going "dark" for 24 hours have any measurable impact on SOPA?

I think so. Most voters still don't know what SOPA is. It's too techie, too complicated to swallow in one sound bite.

Virtually all voters know what Wikipedia is - and the news story itself that will trigger when Wikipedia goes dark will probably get more eyeballs than all the previous SOPA stories combined.

Wiikipedia is also not-for-profit, so their motives are pretty unassailable.

Even though SOPA has been shelved, PIPA is in the pipeline and lobbyists are hard at work - pulling every trick in the book - to advance this agenda. The shelving of SOPA will only energize them further.

(edit :) One of their best tactics may be to be retreat, throw their support behind a sympathetic presidential candidate and try to hinder the re-election of Obama this year. Given that this is the *media* industry, that's pretty serious business.

(edit #2 :) There may even be a back-room deal Obama is making with the media industry : wait until after the election.

What's needed is broad, popular contempt for this technology-crippling agenda such that most legislators don't want to incur the political damage of voting for it.

I think it's fair to say that the blackout will change the political landscape in which this stuff is playing out.


Jan 17, 2012

What can I do to reduce anxiety?

Used to have a terrible problem with this. No more. What I found :

Avoid alcohol and caffeine. Both leave metabolites in your system for a long time; acetaldehyde from alcohol is anxiety inducing as hell.

Steer away from unnecessary stressors. If you don't like to drive and can afford a cab - take it.

Steer into unavoidable stressors. If you can't afford a cab - drive and drive and drive (exposure therapy).

Practice controlled breathing http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=46922 This is startlingly effective for many people; some have posited that anxiety/panic is a disorder rooted in the brain's "suffocation alarm".

The herbal remedy Kava Kava has been clinically shown to alleviate anxiety, in some cases as effectively as a prescription benzodiazepene with fewer side effects. It is legal for anyone to buy in the USA, and a ban in the EU was lifted three years ago after some initial concern over potential for liver damage. Important note - it's got to be processed properly to be effective. It tastes pretty bad but induces a lucid calm with a slight euphoric buzz. It works right away. I recommend this source if you want to try it : http://www.konakavafarm.com/ (the paste or capsules.)

Benzodiazepene medication can be prescribed by a doctor or psychiatrist - these include klonopin, atavin, xanax. They are very effective but are also central nervous system depressants that can a) make depression worse and b) be very hard to get off of. But they can be a good bridge so you can get on with your life in the short term.

Nutrition : Eat well. Especially avoid sugar which can spike your glucose levels. Opt for slow-burning carbohydrates which can be found in diets designed for people with hyperglycemia.

Exercise.

Learn self hypnosis and visualization, http://www.wikihow.com/Perform-Self-Hypnosis

Balance your life. Each day work a bit, play a bit, do nothing a bit. Be around people, be alone. Etc. Anxiety tends to lock people in fixed patterns of behavior which make the anxiety worse


Disclaimer : Again, this is my personal experience, I am not a professional and your mileage may vary.


Jan 17, 2012

Social Dynamics: Is isolationism somehow immoral?

I'm going to be blunt in the hopes of being helpful.

A friend read your query and commented :

"But he's three standard deviations below douche-bag."

She's nineteen. She's right.

OK - Marilyn Vos Savant is about 2 standard deviations above you in IQ tests. And she's an idiot. She wrote a book claiming Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was invalid because the theorem uses non euclidean geometry which isn't ... yanno ... real. Just embarassingly stupid.

So. Look : Lose the whole IQ thing. People don't vandalize your car because you are smart or even aloof. This treatment is reserved for douche-bags.

Start climbing the scale on the social skills meter. And when you do, don't measure your standard deviations from the norm.

Take heed of my bearded friend :


Jan 17, 2012

Do people think less of you if you tell them you have diarrhea?

Well, I'd leave it out of the Valedictorian speech, anyway.


Jan 17, 2012

Why do some people say “no problem” instead of “you’re welcome” when someone thanks them? When I was growing up, the only polite response would be “you’re welcome” or “my pleasure.”

It may come from the french "de rien" and the spanish "de nada", both of which are the accepted response to "thank you" and which mean "nothing" or "it's nothing".

"No problem" seems like a clarification of that idiom.


Jan 17, 2012

How would I speculate on China's economy failing?

This is called Short Selling. It's a rather clever way of betting that a stock will drop rather than rise.

You borrow some shares of that stock. You sell them immediately.
You wait as the price drops. Then you buy them back and return them to the lender. You get to keep the left-over cash.

In the case of entire nations; you pick a company/fund/instrument which is dependent on the overall health of that economy.

(edit : Ravin Thambapillai makes a good point about gold; you wouldn't want to be holding dollars while the Chinese economy tanks)


Jan 17, 2012

Has anything ever escaped the world of programming and become part of popular culture?

The term slang-term "random", meaning "half-assed", "senseless" or "arbitrary" peaked in use around the mid nineties I think.

This was a common insult Bill Gates would use in the very early days of Microsoft (1980 or so). He would point to code and say, "that's totally random".

This seems to have spilled out of Microsoft culture, over to Seattle, down to the Valley, and east to Boston where it took hold at Harvard and MIT.

(This is fairly wild conjecture on my part, but i'm pretty sure it's true.)


Jan 17, 2012

What is the greatest achievement of Western civilization? What can Westerners be proud of in the global community?

Discovering where we are. By watching the sky and thinking really, really hard for generations.

"We are here."


Jan 17, 2012

What is the fatal weakness of western civilization?

It grows.

Western Civilization is an engine which consumes more and more resources, produces more and more people. We always speak of "economic growth" as if it is inherently good.

In the sense of social darwinism, it is.

In a world with limited space and resources, however - it's a recipe for starvation, fuel exhaustion and climate disruption.


Jan 17, 2012

Which Quora users own more than one cat, and what are their names and breeds?

They are in Kitty Elysium now but my two cats were :

Furry Unit Number 16 (nick : sixteen)

and

Calgary Ilyich Von Toast Monkey (nick : calgary)

(They were calico mutts. Calgary was a manx, daugher of 16.)


Jan 17, 2012

How can I be expected to answer any Quora questions while Wikipedia is blacked out in SOPA protest?

Just make up any crazy crap you want! How will we check?

Note : be awake at 12:01 and fix things up.


Jan 18, 2012

What is the message of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

It's astounding : Time is fleeting.

Madness ... takes its toll.


Jan 18, 2012

What book should be made into a movie?

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke.


Jan 19, 2012

What is the best way to (non-awkwardly) make it clear that a male and female co-founder team don't have anything "goin' on"? (other than an awesome startup, of course)

One asks the other for change for the parking meter.

A dollar bill also changes hands.

Romantic partners would almost never settle such a small debt.

So subtle it might only register unconsciously, which is perhaps more effective.


Jan 19, 2012

Should having a girlfriend count as an extracurricular activity for college admissions? Why or why not?

Only if you fence with them.


Jan 19, 2012

How would you describe SOPA in one sentence?

Luddites of the digital age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite


Jan 19, 2012

Why do many computer science graduates leave college not being able to solve fizzbuzz?

They're not familiar with the modulus operator (how often does it come up really?)

Then they take a wrong turn trying to use several counters or loops, quickly get tangled up, and are a little nervous to begin with.

People actually get pretty smug about this. Would I be excited about a coder who can't do FizzBuzz? No.

But it's pretty understandable how it can happen. Interviewers : chill.


Jan 20, 2012

Who is statistically the most significant outlier ever in human history regardless of their field, and what basis do you assert the name you have?

I suppose ole Mozart and Beethoven deserve a spot on this page.

They both are still regarded by many as the greatest composers to ever live; time seems only to increase their fame.


Jan 20, 2012

What is the most unfair advantage a person can have?

The cheat code for the BFG9000

http://revo-emag.com/?p=1025

Seriously, that thing blew up everything in the room.


Jan 20, 2012

What are practical applications of chaos theory?

A japanese company produced a dishwasher whose water jets moved chaotically. I can't find the product now but the researchers were Nomura, Wakami and Kondo, 1995.


Jan 20, 2012

Why did Americans not slaughter all Japanese when Japan surrendered unconditionally in World War II?

Germany in 1900 was perhaps the most advanced country on earth. It may have had equals but it had no superior in engineering, in art (especially music), literature and philosophy. It was civilized, ingenious, productive - a great jewel of western civilization.

Then it was vanquished in World War I. Stripped of territory, crushed under reparations, humiliated (over the US's objections.)

The result of course was that they rose again with an insane ferocity that plunged the next generation into the worst nightmare in human history.

The lesson was well learned. You don't kick a defeated opponent when he's down. You prop him back up, help him rebuild, and plant the seeds of a stable democracy.

Thriving democracies have no reason to fight each other.


Jan 21, 2012

What should I do when a doctor told my wife that the MMR vaccine causes autism? Should I calm down and accept that he might know something I don't as a med tech? Why he would believe this?

To add to Colin Gerber's excellent answer about how this idea got into your doctor's head :

The organization Autism Speaks was the publicity engine behind this piece of junk science.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/01/15/this-question-has-been-asked-and-answered.html

It began when a lousy scientist got confused about causation versus correlation and announced that vaccines cause autism. (Especially blaming the common vaccine component thimerosal - mercury. Get it? Mercury, brain damage, autism.)

Suddenly, autism appeared to be a largely man made, preventable disorder.

An organization was formed to fight the Evil Corporations and Get The Truth Out.
Oh - and there was billions to be made in lawsuits. That too. Autism Speaks was born.

The usual activism machine did what it always does : holds walkathons, conferences, buys TV ads. Careers were launched as otherwise unremarkable people became leaders, spokespeople, visionaries and martyrs.

In the end, it was driven by greed, baseless resentment and ego.

When the science turned out to be bad, Autism Speaks didn't back down - for the simple reason that the vaccine theory had become their raison d'etre,

(edit:) PS : It is my strong personal view you not argue with this doctor, but simply fire him and explain that you prefer a medical professional who keeps themselves informed on important issues in patient care. The debunking of the vaccine-autism link is all over the web and backed by the world's foremost medical authorities. It's been covered in major news outlets. He should know this. It's his job.


Jan 21, 2012

If Quora were a person, would it be male or female?

It would be male because it gets into everything, fights a lot. and can't find its keys ... When people lose their keys, where should they look? What are some places where people frequently misplace their keys?


Jan 21, 2012

What are some of the best websites? Why?

The original I Kiss You site (which was the inspiration for Borat, btw)

http://www.istanbul.tc/mahir/mahir/

I'm quite serious, in a minimalist way I guess.

("I like sex! Who is want to come to Turkey? I can invitate. She can stay in my home.")

There is something very human and genuine in his awkward cloying. Lots of people think so :




Jan 21, 2012

What should happen to the teens behind the brutal group beating of the Chicago student?

In addition to maximum penalties for the charges against them, their identities should be made public online so that this act forever haunts them via the same media they used to boast of it.

One of the attackers who didn't cover his face has been identified as Raymond Palomino, 17 years old :

The other attackers are identified here, http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=219_1326803804 but i won't repeat the names in this forum as their faces are covered and there is always the possibility of mistaking their identity. Court records should soon confirm their identities (they are likely to be tried as adults.)

Wait - shouldn't we wait for a conviction ? I don't believe so. That video makes each of us witnesses to the crime in a moral sense; the only question is that of identity, not guilt of those filmed.

Reasonable people may differ on this point but there it is.


Jan 21, 2012

Why do so many Americans like Atlas Shrugged, when everyone else in the world thinks it's tedious nonsense?

A few points after I put on my asbestos underpants.

OK:

The American Literati universally disregard Ayn Rand (author) as not just wrong, but unworthy of rebuttal (i.e., tedious nonsense). To be clear: there may be visionary proponents of rational self-interest, but Rand isn't one.

Lots of people do buy her book. Falling in-and-out of love with Atlas Shrugged is viewed as a sort of embarassing phase in a person's intellectual adolescence.


So what's behind this popular appeal in the US? Some thoughts:

America in the 20th century underwent a shift towards Collectivism: Income Taxes, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, The New Deal, the Great Society, etc. This created great internal conflict which Rand's work speaks to.

America also underwent a decades-long cold war with the Soviet Union. We were seriously spooked by communism. Rand's work speaks to that fear.

Rand's first book: The Fountainhead, was actually pretty good. An architect sees his design corrupted by greedy developers (they want to put Roman columns at the entrance of a sleek modern structure, for example). This simple defense of the sanctity of ideas was quite reasonable and compelling (Rand somehow misses the irony that in a free market, the purchasers of the architect's blueprint are perfectly free to screw with it in any way they please).

So Rand was already famous in America when Atlas Shrugged was released, and in fact there was an aggressive marketing campaign in the US before Atlas Shrugged was even finished.

Finally, America has always been inordinately proud of its (er, former) industrial might. People like Thomas Alva Edison are heroes. Even those with questionable ethics like William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller are viewed with awed reverence. These are the same heroes as in Atlas Shrugged.


Jan 21, 2012

What are the most memorable moments on Saturday Night Live when the actors broke character?

In Chris Farley's "Motivational Speaker Sketch", David Spade and Christina Applegate can't keep it together and have to just cover their faces to hide their laughter :


Jan 25, 2012

What are some things that alpha individuals rarely do?

Dawdle.

Alpha types seem possessed of this deep sense that life is ticking away, and now is the time to do stuff.

Steve Jobs expressed this -

for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Jan 31, 2012

What is the best (funniest/cleverest) variation on the phrase "I got 99 problems and a bitch ain't one"?

If you havin' Perl problems I feel bad for you son, I got ninety-nine servers runnin' all Python.


Feb 5, 2012

How has using Quora benefitted you?

I always meant to blog, but could never quite get around to it.

The 'reverse-blogging'' nature of quora - where there is this sense of urgency because at least one person (the questioner) really cares about the content - has spurred me to do some writing on a variety of topics.

It got me writing.


Feb 6, 2012

Are people drinking more loose tea instead of bagged tea?

I just started over christmas break. A welsh friend introduced me to it.

So, um, +1 I guess.


Feb 8, 2012

Are functional programming languages more suited to parallel computing?

The short answer is Yes, especially for multicore processors.

Functional Programming's tenets of immutable data and no side-effects ensures that parallel processes don't clobber each other's data.

The early Cray supercomputers used a variant of Lisp.

For more on this subject, see Dr. Dobb's article :
http://drdobbs.com/tools/212201710


Feb 8, 2012

What words have you horribly mispronounced because you read them before hearing them?

Meme. I still don't know how to pronounce it ...


Feb 8, 2012

Do penguins fly?

I must disagree with the well-intentioned answers given.

On one special day of the year ... penguins take flight.


Feb 8, 2012

What is the most hauntingly beautiful song?

If I had to save only one ... The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel ...


Feb 10, 2012

What historical trivia (and/or little-known facts) do you find extremely interesting?


Alexander Graham Bell personally hated the telephone. He found it noisy and intrusive. In his working years, he refused to have one installed in his office.

As an old man, his family attempted to install one in his house in case of an emergency. The phone kept 'breaking' due to apparent acts of tinkering sabotage.

Also - on the occasion of his death, every Bell telephone in existence was silenced for one minute in his honor.


Feb 10, 2012

What's next?

Heads-up, hands-free mobile technology.

The days of holding your smartphone and poking at it will soon draw to a close. The technology is already there.

Your 'phone' will be the size of a cigarette lighter, clipped to you somewhere. A heads-up visual display will render textual and graphical information from your eyeglasses (or sunglasses or vanity glasses). You will browse by looking in certain directions and using voice commands.

Ears, eyes and mouth will be more wired more directly into the grid via "smart glasses" (with headphones and mic.)


Feb 10, 2012

What is the evolutionary role and effect of denying evolution?

Wow good question. Disclaimer : I believe in a supreme Being.

Once people assort themselves into tribes, a major social-darwinistic advantage is gained by a belief in : a) A creator b) an afterlife c) "tribal exceptionalism" - that this tribe is looked upon with special favor by the Creator.

This creates tribe members more willing to die for the tribe in battle. They believe that they are headed to a better place.

So in a social-darwinism sense, tribes with these supernatural beliefs can be expected to fight more aggressively (we certainly see that with radical Islam today.) To the extent that evolution challenges these beliefs, evolution theory can put societies at an evolutionary disadvantage.


Feb 10, 2012

Did all of Europe during the Middle Ages really not realize that boiling water made it safe? Did an entire continent for hundreds of years really not realize that they could have just boiled the water and drank it?

In addition to the other answers which indicate there is no reason at all to suspect boiling water makes it safer (it's really not intuitive at all), there does appear to have been an unconscious realization - or perhaps evolutionary pressure - toward boiling water.

Tea became popular virtually everywhere it was introduced : China, India, Europe, the USA, etc. Tea drinking cultures got sick less, lived to raise more tea drinking children, who became tea-drinking soldiers etc.

For people who had no reason to believe boiling water killed pathogens, humanity spent a hell of a lot of time boiling their water.


Feb 10, 2012

What would be a friendlier alternative to Quora's creepy hooded Anon User/default avatar?


Feb 13, 2012

Why is it racist to present an image of black people as liking fried chicken and watermelon? How did this stereotype come to be? How is it different than Japanese people liking udon and sushi, or French liking crepes and wine?

Neither the French nor the Japanese were a brutalized and exploited minority.


Feb 13, 2012

What is the difference between accepting a mathematical axiom and accepting a statement on faith?

Axioms are just an abbreviated conditional.

For example, we may have the axiom "parallel lines do not cross.". Call it P.

Rather than 'assuming' axiom P, we could state in front of every statement we wish to express (in euclidean geometry.)

If P, then ...

So we're completely agnostic about P. And really, mathematics is always agnostic about its axioms. It would just get tedious to write all these conditionals all the time, so we wrap them up in a set of axioms.

It's short-hand, and implies no actual belief in the statement.


Feb 13, 2012

How do you meet new friends in a new city?

This actually works :

Get yourself a really cool looking motor scooter, like this :


People will ask you about it wherever you go. Ice broken.


Feb 13, 2012

Should we buy children what they want for Christmas or teach them to manage their expectations?

The harsh realities of life will confront them soon enough.

Childhood is a magical time for kids. They are shielded, their dreams indulged. The buoyancy of this magic will last a lifetime and carry them through the storms that lie ahead.

Get 'em what they want. This time is short.


Feb 13, 2012

What single improvement would you make to the human genome?

500 year lifetime. It's much, much too short.


Feb 14, 2012

Why not have a funeral service just before a person dies?

It could lead to awkward situations like this :


Feb 15, 2012

How does this recent ad by Israel's Absorption Ministry make American Jews feel?

Manipulated. It's distasteful.

(The couple is an israeli woman and non-israeli man; the woman is observing Memorial Day - a somber occasion with candles and music. The guy is clueless.)

Obviously, the woman could have just told the guy. Not a big deal.


Feb 15, 2012

What do Quorans look like with their shirts off?


Feb 17, 2012

In layman’s terms, what caused the 2008 financial crisis?

Excellent movie on the subject, Inside Job:

This documentary film explains:

Traditional banks got into the investment business.

'Derivatives' were invented. These are exotic packages of other instruments (like home loans). They are largely unregulated.

Credit Rating Agencies like Moody's Investors Service straight up lied about the quality of derivatives. This attracted conservative investment like retirement funds.

Now that banks had a lucrative way to offload bad home loans, they started giving mortgages to anybody who walked in off the street. 1997-2006 United States Housing Bubble ensued.



Feb 17, 2012

Why do people remain homeless?

In addition to the other excellent answers, there is a huge bootstrapping problem.

It's really tough to get somewhere from nothing. You need a job, but you don't have clothing appropriate for an interview. Maybe you don't even have an acceptable, current form of ID. No phone for them to call you back.

You have no laptop to search for more jobs and check email. The library offers an hour free internet time but it's a five mile walk away.

And the sole of your right shoe just fell off.


Feb 17, 2012

How can someone become more energetic?

Good answers all. A small addition :

Hit the ground running in the morning. Pre-industrial humans were fairly active little monkeys who were active pretty much upon wakening. It's my personal theory that a lot of people are encountering trouble "starting their motor" in our recently developed industrial world.

Specifically, as soon as possible, get outside and get walking. Even if it's a few blocks away to a coffee shop. Brisk pace is better. Farther is better too.

Again, my personal theory. If I don't do this I tend to feel low energy all day.


Feb 17, 2012

Why is the work of G. Spencer-Brown (Laws of Form) so little known?

The Laws of Form seem to be saying something very important, and Russell's endorsement is impressive. It's also very beautifully written.

However, if you reflect on it after a while - you realize Spencer-Brown isn't saying anything. It's a rather ponderous reformulation of Propositional Logic with just two operators (OR and NOT). This trick (and notation) had been in use by switching engineers for a generation.

We already had Propositional Logic.

In the last chapter, Spencer-Brown tries to do something original when he tries to develop a multi-valued logic to handle states which change over time (like an oscillator.) Here, he devolves into hand-waving and doesn't build anything precise.

Spencer-Brown further damaged his reputation by claiming a simpler proof to the four-color map problem, which he never provided.


Feb 17, 2012

If you were to redesign Quora with your own vision, what would you do differently?

I would add lots of fun analytics. Those upvotes are very addictive; I think people would enjoy more feedback to gawk at.

How do my upvotes look graphically since I joined? How have my followers grown over time? What topics are trending?

What milestones have I passed? Etc.


Feb 19, 2012

What lifestyle trade-offs would Americans have to make if all fossil fuel energy production were halted immediately?

An immediate halt to fossil fuel production would be more calamitous than a lifestyle change.

Our agriculture is wholly dependent on fossil fuels; industry and transportation would also stop. There would be widespread famine, complete economic collapse (money is worthless) and probable collapse of military and police.

A likely outcome would be small bands of armed raiders trying to grab the last remaining food, fuel and water while those areas which could actually sustain themselves become fortresses who shoot at anybody who approaches.

We have no idea how to feed 7 billion people if oil were suddenly shut off.


Feb 19, 2012

What are good ways to link offline shopping and service consumption with Facebook open graph activity?

Groupon manages this with a straight up cash offer (redeemable in groupons.)

Note that it's not a one-off thing (10 bucks or so for broadcasting the deal) but rather 10 bucks for every friend that clicks through that (personalized) link.

People are savvy about network effects and think, "if i get five people, that's fiddy bucks. I could use fiddy bucks."

It's not clear that this tactic is economically sustainable (profits, Groupon?)


Feb 19, 2012

If a girl tries to make you stay by saying "Get real—you won't be able to get with someone else as hot as me", what does that say about her?

I get where the negative answers are coming from, my gut reaction was "b-i-t-c-h".

But really, she's just being a little cocky and wants to get with you.

Which aren't necessarily bad things.


Feb 19, 2012

If all humanity could agree to do one thing, what should it be?

Feed every human.

(chart shows hungry/malnourished people, in millions, by area)


Feb 19, 2012

Do any active Quora users still use Facebook more often than they do Quora?

Sure. FB is for quick communication with people I know.

Quora is for deep communication with people I don't.


Feb 19, 2012

What is the best movie you have seen that most people probably haven’t ever heard of?

The Bothersome Man : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808185/

Streaming on Netflix. A man attempts suicide, and ends up in a very peculiar purgatory. Life is easy and ... bland. Nothing is bad, nothing is good, nothing feels likes anything at all. Chocolate doesn't taste good, wounds don't hurt.

The hero tries to kill himself - again. He won't die. So he plots his escape ...


Feb 20, 2012

How do I learn to appreciate surrealist paintings?

(Disclaimer : when I say 'Abstract Art' i really mean 'American Abstract Expressionism')

Abstract art is about retraining your eyes to stop looking for an image.

We are so used to scanning for objects in real life and in representational art.
You have to quiet that part of your mind. Abstract art isn't of anything. You're
not supposed to recognize objects or be dazzled at the artist's skill. Abstract art can be very simple; the artist is attempting to communicate feeling in a radically more direct way than representational art.

Take a look at Jackson Pollock :

Maybe you see a drunken jazz party. Stop that. This isn't a Rorschach test.

Now you think, "Man, this isn't hard. My kid could do this!" Knock it off, this isn't a skill contest.

Look. It's paint and surface, nothing else. Feel the swirls. Their energy. Their tangling. Pollock goes all the way to the edge of the canvas where it's just as busy as the center. Feel the tension as everywhere the eye looks, you miss something. It's hard to take in.

You don't have to like it. If you hate it, hate it passionately, for what it is.

Here's Rothko :

Not much seems to be here. Give it some time. How do the colors feel? Alone and in contrast? The borders - they're kind of smudgy. What feeling does that give?

Many people find Rothko's work terribly sad; maybe you feel the same way. If so, you're definitely beginning to get it. But you may feel differently altogether - as long as you're feeling something you're 'getting' abstract art.

Keep at it, keep trying. In my case, it came all at once staring at a Pollock. In an instant some circuit went off and I was all "Oh. My. God." From that instant forward I found myself saying "The only real art is abstract."

Try other "Abstract Expressionists" and other flavors of Abstract. It'll come.


Feb 20, 2012

The Hunt for Red October (1990 movie): Is it true that if one submarine comes in behind another submarine's propeller "he's deaf as a post"?

To add to Russell Canty's excellent answer :

In simulations anyway, this tactic was employed in just one circumstance : To sneak up behind a sub and sink it with torpedoes - before the target sub had a chance to launch countermeasures or torps in response.

It's a very dangerous maneuver.

I heard some sub commanders say this was sometimes done to simply spook the "Victor" (soviet) as part of the continual underwater cat-and-mouse psychological game that was played.,


Feb 21, 2012

Should I, as a company director, be nice to salesmen, or is it all one way?

There is a deep, financial cost to being an asshole which is untraceable.

First, good people leave. Usually the best. "I'm good at this, why not be respected somewhere else?"

They don't tell you they're leaving because you're an asshole, that is not in their interest. You get the usual "pursue other great opportunities despite my rewarding tenure here at blah blah blah ..."

But they'll tell everybody else. Not out of spite; because it's valuable information.

Word spreads. VC's find out. Big clients find out. Coders find out, your landlord finds out.

Suddenly, you're "unlucky". The best people don't apply. Sales drop. Schedules slip. Your lease doesn't get renewed because the landlord wants to give his brother-in-law a break (who happened to be a former salesman of yours.)

Uh oh. Board meeting time. Bad news to break. Yea - you'll be real nice now.

Don't wait.


Feb 21, 2012

What is the next step in the Iran Sanctions game?

Agree with Andrew Lemke, the next step isn't economic, it's an Israeli military strike which is unlikely to knock out all of Iran's nuclear capacity.

Just a really bad scenario unfolding.


Feb 21, 2012

Why was the movie Sideways called Sideways?

To state User's answer a little differently, both Miles and Jack end up in good places despite a series of god awful decisions and screwups.

They stumble sideways into their destiny; that is - despite the fact they are walking the wrong way, they end up in the right place.


Feb 23, 2012

What's the worst (or even funny or awkward) thing a boss has ever asked you to do for your job?

Lie.

I was asked to burn up Cray computer tine while working for the DoD, to give the appearance the Cray was being used (it wasn't.)

i 'forgot'.


Feb 23, 2012

Is it better to let a word like "chink" lose its meaning by allowing it to be used in common dialect, or to actively campaign against the implications of the word?

Bah, leave language alone.

It really comes down to intent. By far most Americans do not intend to invoke any racial slur at all. The minority who do are dicks and won't listen anyway.
There is no intent in using 'chink' in the canonical sense; i'll bet there are even a few people who use it to refer to Asians without realizing it's derogatory.


Feb 23, 2012

What are some simple things that really annoy people?

Talking too much.

About 10% of the human race has this weird disease where they're not actually conversing (taking turns), they just go on and on about whatever topic suits them at the moment - usually some mundane interpersonal or logistical issue.

They won't let go of the talking stick. You can't change topics.

They seem oblivious to the fact people tend to avoid them. Booze of course can make this much worse.

Shaddap already.


Feb 23, 2012

Is Quora the new Google? Will Quora eventually become a mainstream search engine? Instead of saying "Google it" will we eventually be saying "Quor it"?

No.

Google finds content. Quora generates it.


Feb 24, 2012

What has Quora taught you?

Crowdsourcing can be civil, constructive, and respectful.

Sure there's a few bad apples, but for the most part Quora signals a hard break from the past where online forums were pretty hostile places to be.


Feb 24, 2012

What are the weakest topics in Quora?

I think there are a lot of loaded questions in Religion.

I'm a fervent supporter of gay rights, but when I see a question like this - Why are so many religions and religious people driven into a frenzy by homosexuality? I'm tempted to coin the phrase "God bashing".

It's an unfair characterization of believers.


Feb 24, 2012

What are the disadvantages of API-centric web applications?

I think in general API-based apps are the Right Thing. It's easier to adapt your app to other platforms like mobile apps and even SMS-based interfaces.

It's sort of like Functional Programming, where there are no side effects and everything comes out very clean.

The only drawback I can see is that Session is not maintained on the server automatically (it would be a side effect.) This feels a little awkward to experienced web developers and makes them do some extra work.

For a serious project that is really going places, the extra work is probably worth it. If you just want to bang up a prototype though, API-centric may be overkill.


Feb 24, 2012

If the Internet were a person, how would you define him/her?

Rainman with the world's largest porn collection.


Feb 24, 2012

Is there an evolutionary advantage to blushing?

It may serve as a signal of sexual attraction, hence rouge.


Feb 24, 2012

What was NATOs intended strategy for war with the Soviet Union in Europe?

Use tactical nuclear weapons. There was a general sense (tho not universal) that NATO would be unable to hold off a Soviet invasion with conventional weapons.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19841201&id=IpwzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zDIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=1778,4404141


Feb 24, 2012

What are some tasty alcoholic drinks for people who dislike the taste of alcohol?

Gin and tonic does a great job of concealing the taste of booze.

So does vodka and fruit juice.

And here's a weird one : mix triple sec with soda water in a shot glass. Slam it on the table and drink it quick. I don't know why this works but it does. (Sprite works in the absence of soda water.)


Feb 26, 2012

When and how did you find out that you're a zombie?

Brainzzz.


Feb 27, 2012

What is a "common sense" concept you feel most people seem to be simply oblivious to?

"Did you get my last email/text ?"

Unless the person never got one from you, they have no way of knowing if the last one they read is the last one you sent.


Feb 27, 2012

How should I deal with my boyfriend who has trust issues and can't comprehend that I enjoy entirely platonic relationships with other men?

Jon Mixon (Quora user) is right. I have encountered this as well and a) it gets worse b) it is often the suspicious person who is untrustworthy themselves. "A liar is one who won't believe anyone else."


Feb 27, 2012

After a long-term relationship breakup, I realized how insignificant my life is. I am alone, I distanced myself from my friends. My family is unhappy and depressing. I'm tired of college. What do you do when you realize that your life is in ruins?

"When you are going through hell, keep going." -- Winston Churchill.


Mar 1, 2012

How did cocaine come to be looked upon as "glamorous"?

Coke was very expensive in the early seventies, well out of reach of your average "street" drug user. It was also considered relatively harmless. As a stimulant, people could still be productive on it (even hyper productive.)

It found popularity among show business types who could more easily afford it and who needed to be 'on'.

Cocaine use was common, for example, in 1976 during writing sessions of Saturday Night Live. It was all over Studio 54. Paramount head Robert Evans was coked up constantly, finally getting busted for it in 1980.

Really, it permeated the movie and TV business. This is likely where it picked up its glamorous sheen.

Photo : stage prop at Studio 54 depicting the Man on the Moon with cocaine spoon.


Mar 1, 2012

If you could send one item of information into space just before an apocalypse, what would it be?

We were here.

Watch out for the ice, it moves.

Don't make bombs out of the heavy metals from the ground.

Don't burn too much of the black liquid down there either.

Try not to fight over the question of Who created all this. We never found out for sure.

Try not to fight at all.

Beware the tiniest creatures, too small to see, some so small they are barely alive. They're the most dangerous.

In all our time here, we never got a visitor from somewhere else. We never saw a flicker of life from the sky. As far as we know, there is no place like this, and no creature like you.

It's a very special place. Good luck.


Mar 1, 2012

What is some shit that nobody says?

Please, tell me more about your dream last night.

Why have I never been audited?

Where can I find KFed deep tracks?

Get your boobs out of my face until I'm done with my taxes.


Mar 1, 2012

Cuteness: What are some of the cutest things?

OK, my original answer in may is the corgi stampede at the bottom of my answer.

This just in, trending on youtube : Twin 11 month-old girls rockin out to Dad's guitar.
This is cute beyond all reason ...

Corgi puppy stampede, FTW :


Mar 1, 2012

What are some good movies or shows for a father to watch with his young sons?

The movies I most enjoyed seeing with my Dad weren't kid movies (by the time I was 7 or so, I was precocious, but something tells me your kids are too.)

The original Star Wars.

The World's Fastest Indian. A strong bonding between old man and young boy, very much a guy flick but in all the good ways. Also, a true story - an old man in his seventies breaks the world speed record on a motorcycle - the record still stands.


Mar 1, 2012

If you were asked to spend the summer teaching tennis in Nantucket, MA for $1k/week. Would you do it?

Go.

You can not go later.


Mar 2, 2012

How do you defend yourself from velociraptor attacks?

Set your time machine back to 2012, get out, and bash it to pieces with a sledgehammer.

Been there, done that.


Mar 2, 2012

How do you ask a girl out on a date without breaking the current relationship (friendship)? I have a huge crush on this girl. I don’t think she knows. We’ve been talking on Facebook and we belong to the same institute.

Sometimes it helps to be very clear, direct, leave the ball in her court and allow for a graceful exit.

"If you're not attached, I'd really like to take you out. Text me if you wanna." Drop your digits on the table and walk away.


Mar 2, 2012

Is Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz right when he says Media Matters is tolerating -- and even promoting -- Anti-Semitism?

I am Jewish, so Dersh can't call me antisemitic.

Dersh is a total douchebag.

Many American Jews and Israeli Jews oppose Likud's policies, let alone those parties farther to the right in Netanyahu's coalition.

Dersh has resorted to simple name-calling, and knows it.

Dersh is a total douchebag.


Mar 2, 2012

Why hasn't science made religion obsolete?

The success of Science, that is: the discovery of perfect laws, of deep structure in reality - can be interpreted by some as evidence of the existence of God.


Mar 5, 2012

Open-minded people - What are your limits, if any?

Hunting. Killing animals for fun should be unthinkable.

Boxing. Paying two people to beat the crap out of each other for our amusement (thanx, ancient rome) degrades our whole species. (I do enjoy watching the classic Ali/Frazier/Forman/Tyson bouts, but shouldn't.)

Bull fighting. Except when the matador gets skewered. j/k. Not really.

Free energy. There are persistent myth that free energy machines have been invented. No, they haven't. Such an idea wouldn't be suppressed, it would be immediately coopted by the military industrial complex to get us off Arab oil, and to relieve the headaches of nuclear reactor maintenance (and accidents).

Aliens have landed and putzed around. Kidnapped people. Made crop circles. Blew up cows. Built the pyramids. Look : Any species advanced enough to cross space doesn't need to land to study us in detail; if they did they could do it in a way which is totally undetectable. If they wanted to make contact they could plop down on the white house lawn. Or light up the night sky with a big, "Hi! We're aliens and stuff."

Crazy assed conspiracies : The illuminati control history. And the Masons. And the Jews, the Skull and Bones Society, the Bilderberg group. Look : certainly there are groups that have schemed for global control. It's too damned hard with all the other groups trying to control the world, the unpredictable nature of war and revolution, the unforseen consequences of technology. Nobody can execute strategy that perfectly. 9/11 was not an inside job. The slightest screwup in that plan risked exposing the perpetrators who would have been executed for treason and mass murder. Not a resonable gamble for the rich and powerful who have it pretty good. Nobody pulls the strings because there's too many strings and they don't stay attached long.

Socialism : We need to let people get rich. Build empires. Buck the system, drop out of school, launch an idea nobody thinks will work. This isn't possible in a state control economy.

Capitalism : We're letting humans starve, for Christ's sake.


Mar 5, 2012

What is the worst thing you have had to apologise for?

I was a hot-head in my youth. I'm not anymore.

It was the dot-com boom and everybody was stressed, distracted and frustrated. A noob walked into a meeting and talked on and on and on without addressing the problem.

I blurted out, "OK. This is the part of the meeting where you shut the f--- up!"

I couldn't believe it. The guy, stunned, just sat down. I apologized after the meeting, and then in email, and then took him out to lunch. I still never felt I could make it right.

That was ten years ago and i have never said a word in anger like that to any coworker, noob or not. It was that day I learned the importance of Chill.

He's doing really well now, VP at a big company. Caught up with him and he joked, "Really - it was time for me to shut the f--- up. But ..." "... you don't say that", I finished for him. He laughed, "No, you really don't. Anyway, it's cool. Send me your resume?"


Mar 5, 2012

What is the biggest change that has happened in a single day?

One day, a long long time ago, a timid primate overcame his or her deep, instinctive fear of fire. S/he approached a fire probably caused by lightening, and carried a piece of it away.

Within just a few centuries meat became a regular part of the descendant's diet. The stomach shrank and the spine straightened.

This unknown Prometheus did more to change the course of humanity than anyone else, I believe.


Mar 5, 2012

What are the best responses a student can tell a guidance counselor when they say "you'll never amount to anything"?

Amount to something.


Mar 5, 2012

What is the worst business decision ever made in the hi-tech world?

Microsoft's investment in Apple of $150M in 1997, which saved Apple from bankruptcy.

MS revived a monster competitor who charged into critical new markets like mobile, who's now worth more, who leads the world in mind-share, and who taunts them to blistering effect in TV ads.


Mar 5, 2012

What would happen if King Kong and Donkey Kong got unleashed playing ping-pong in Hong Kong?

Dozens of news casters would be fired for cracking up while trying to report on the demise of thousands. Were this to occur during any event involving Ping Pong, it would simply be unreportable.


Mar 7, 2012

What is the meaning behind the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Good answers here, in summary : The monolith is a device placed by an unseen alien race/force. It imparts knowledge or intelligence to the early primates.

To add another point - notice what they are eating, before and after their encounter with the monolith. Before - they are foraging around for berries. They are surrounded by boars (?) who are competing for the same food supply.

After - they're munching boar meat. They realize a hand-held bone makes an effective hunting tool.

They just got promoted way up the food chain.


Mar 7, 2012

Who invented the human microphone?

Humans.


Mar 7, 2012

What is absurdist humor?

Fourteen racoons.


Mar 8, 2012

Why is buying and selling gold suddenly so popular?

The '08 financial crisis triggered a spike in the demand for gold. People saw gold as a hedge against other uncertain instruments and against inflation. Once the price started to rise, many economists claim a speculative bubble ensued where investors were just chasing after other investors.

It also became easier to buy and sell gold through the creation of Exchange Traded Funds, which made trading in gold a point-and-click transaction.


Mar 8, 2012

Is Iran trying to develop a nuclear weapon?

Edit : flip flopping my answer from Yes to No.

In light of this report, it seems that they're not. The claim in the Western press that enrichment near 20% points toward a weapons program isn't really tenable. Thanks to User-11710714367496047926 for shedding some light on this here, If Iran nukes Israel or vice-versa, why should anybody else be threatened by that? What is the big deal? Why should the world declare war on Iran?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/us-iran-usa-nuclear-idUSBRE82M0G020120323

"The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead." -- Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball, Reuters

Mar 10, 2012

What is some shit that Americans say when visiting foreign countries?

"This is so historic."


Mar 10, 2012

What are some of the very best Bach recordings? Why?

E. Power Biggs doing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

I don't know why, but nobody else seems to play it right. Biggs seems to get just the right timing of dissonance and consonance.


Mar 11, 2012

What are some really good books where the protagonist dies?

Death of a Salesman.

The heart wrenching tale of not a hero who dies in battle, not a martyr, not a drunken artist - but an ordinary man whose life is flickering out.

His values are somewhat corrupt - he believes in 'success' and personal attractiveness. He's disappointed that his sons aren't attractive. He's cheated on his wife. He's not very ethical but we feel great sympathy for him.

Not a great man brought down by great crimes; an ordinary man whose life amounts to nothing due to the commonest transgressions. A life which is passing unnoticed.

In its ordinariness, the tale takes on an almost unbearable sadness.

"Attention must be paid", the protagonist often objects.

Arthur Miller. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1949.


Mar 13, 2012

How much resources would a Pattern recognition app for Android consume?

Image recognition is generally CPU and RAM intensive. Normally I wouldn't worry about speed at all until you've built your first prototype, but in this case I would do the image processing in the cloud because :

It's known to be a resource hog.

You may wish to use a library not in Java (like OpenCV or something.)

As you make improvements to it (now it can count cars, bicycles and beer cans!) all of your users get that functionality without updating their app.


Mar 14, 2012

What are some cool startup ideas you can't act on?

CopSlap 600.


Mar 14, 2012

Why do women/girls often go to the bathroom/restroom/washroom together?

It's female wing-man mission control. Your fate depends on what happens in there.


Mar 14, 2012

What are the best images that make fun of Facebook?


Mar 14, 2012

Why do Westerners like to insist that Zen Buddhism is "anti-rational"?

I would rather say 'extra-rational'.


Mar 14, 2012

What are the best movies about aliens?

KPAX, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272152/.

We are introduced to a psychiatric patient and left wondering whether he is delusional or an alien (as he claims to be.)

It's not until the song that accompanies the credits that we learn that he was, in fact, an alien.


Mar 19, 2012

Do spoof of any famous website exists?

Uncyclopeda http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com is a huge, funny, crowd-sourced spoof of Wikipedia.


Mar 24, 2012

Should I quit using Google products?

It may make sense to "diversify" your private info among companies who don't like to cooperate. Use hotmail, for instance.

"If a product is free, remember : you are the real product."


Mar 24, 2012

What was the most peaceful moment in your life?

Some years ago, through circumstances too sordid to expand upon, I found myself near a highway without a car, a wallet, or a phone. I was completely disconnected. I didn't know what I would do next.

I walked toward a nearby town, but it was a long walk. I got a little tired. It was a warm, sunny day. I decided I would really like to take a nap before continuing.

I walked up a grassy hill, and a bit down the other side so traffic wouldn't see me. I lay down in the grass.

I suppose I should have been very upset, but I wasn't. Free from any connection, expectation - any certainty at all about what the next few hours would bring ... I was able to just lay there, Like I was floating on grass, untethered to the human world.

I'll never forget it.

(I bumped into an old friend by coincidence when I finally got into town and things sorted themselves out.)


Mar 29, 2012

If Iran nukes Israel or vice-versa, why should anybody else be threatened by that? What is the big deal? Why should the world declare war on Iran?

Israel certainly has a contingency plan to not only strike back at Iran, but to unleash its stockpile of 200 or so warheads at all its Arab neighbors. The rationale being, "let's stop the next war now as well."

I'm not saying that would necessarily happen, but clearly the option has been considered.

It would be a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe of WWII proportions.

The oil-dependent powers would find it necessary to invade and occupy the entire mideast to secure the oil supply. This would probably not happen quickly enough to stave off global economic collapse and famine.


Mar 29, 2012

What's going wrong with Google+? Is Facebook winning the war?

G+ didn't solve a problem. Or rather, the only problem G+ attempted to solve was Google's envy of Facebook.


Mar 30, 2012

How do people discover new wines?

I walk into a little, family-owned wine shop on a slow day and let the owner make suggestions. I tell him/her what my favorite cheeses or other food is, what wines I've liked before, and they make suggestions. I assure them that it's OK if I don't like it, I'll be back.

Every now and then I just ask "Forget about me - what do *you* like?"


Mar 31, 2012

Is Quora in trouble? If so, how should they respond?

I would suggest that when Google tries to duplicate your functionality, you're not in trouble - you are trouble. Quora is a deeply engaging, well designed and unique tool.

Will their numbers grow? Will they cash out for a billion? I don't f------ know.

But they made a dent in the universe, and that matters more (to me anyway.)


Apr 2, 2012

Why did IBM's OS/2 project lose to Microsoft, given that IBM had much more resources than Microsoft at that time?

Esther Schindler's essay on this is pretty awesome. To summarize (unless she wants to herself : )

Things got weird in the MS/IBM partnership as MS entered the consumer market with their own competing Windows OS.

IBM had a huge culture-clash with a new generation of young techies. IBM knew how to talk with big companies, not small time (initially) app developers, online communities, or even customers. Their UI was sub-par even though their OS was more stable. They just didn't get how to foster excitement, loyalty and community.


Apr 2, 2012

Are there other examples of successful/influential people who have a documented history of mental illness like Winston Churchill?

Kurt Gödel showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia - he starved himself to death in the belief people were poisoning his food.

Howard Hughes suffered from a debilitating fear of germs and other Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) traits.


Apr 2, 2012

Why was Lisp the language of choice for AI research?

(EDIT : 3/31/2015) I don't see it mentioned elsewhere, but Alanzo Church devised the Lambda-Calculus to express algorithms in the 1950's. He was working on theorems regarding computability (see Church-Turing Theorem). Lisp is a very close implementation of the Lambda Calculus.

Some languages, like C, are good for doing a huge collection of simple things very fast. So a game, or an operating system like UNIX come out well in C.

LISP, on the other hand, abandons speed and tight interaction with the hardware. LISP is focused on solving very deep algorithmic problems. So LISP trades speed and hardware access for :

Minimal syntax : You can write the LISP syntax on a match book cover. The language is really trying to get out of your way.

Ease of analysis : The lack of side effects means that a LISP function serves a single, clear purpose : Take in some stuff - don't change it (immutability), pass back some new stuff - and do nothing else (no side effects.) It's thus easier to be confident about a function's correctness (and to prove theorems about it.)

Parallel friendliness. Sure - LISP can be slow - and AI problems can be computationally intensive (think chess.) However, the two features mentioned above - immutability and lack of side effects makes LISP easier to parallelize on supercomputers. So while LISP may be 10x slower, the problems it attacks are so hard that a 100,000x boost is required. Hardware can achieve this, exploiting LISP's parallel-friendly design.

No distinction between data and code : Code is data and data is code. So LISP can write LISP, and often does.


There is also an historical reason : LISP is MIT's language. The very bricks of MIT are coded in LISP. MIT's been the center of AI research since the late 60's.

(I know, I know, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard might object to that last :) )


Apr 3, 2012

How can you display an animated gif picture on Facebook wall?

You can't. Facebook blocks animated GIFs.

See Why doesn't Facebook allow animated Gifs?

Edit : Starting 4/4/2012, I started to see animated GIFs (apparently) in my feed.


Apr 3, 2012

What should Rick Stratton do in response to Facebook's wrongful cease and desist?

Ceast and Desist orders are pretty routine. Lawyers will often bang them out based simply on a hunch. They hope to get lucky and the legal letter head intimidates the target into stopping.

In the US, they can be sent by anyone at all. You don't even have to be a lawyer.

In this case, Rick Stratton has nothing to do with the offending website. He should not call facebook's lawyer - lawyers sometimes take this opportunity to employ intimidation tactics they would never commit to writing.

He should simply reply with a letter, return-receipt, which says "I received your Ceast and Desist Letter dated X. I have no involvement in the creation or control of http://www.defaceable.com/."

That's it. He'll probably never hear from them again.

/Not a lawyer


Apr 4, 2012

Should Quora users respond to all comments made on their answers?

I liked Garrick Saito's answer and agree with his points. My take is this :

It's perfectly OK not to respond to comments. It's not like fan mail!

As for trolls, the ancient net addage "don't feed the trolls" applies. If someone is just being contrary with no substance, it's really important for me (and probably the community) to let them have the last word. Flame wars are a big time waster for the Answerer. There is a huge emotional temptation to respond. That temptation is misguided. A reply draws you into a non constructive flame war, and rewards the troll. When people starve off the trolls, they tend to get bored and go away.

For people who aren't trolling but disagreeing substantively, I still usually don't reply. I trust the reader to think for themselves, read my view, the commenter's view, and work it out for themselves. In fact, if a disagreeing comment strikes me as especially cogent, I will usually upvote it.

Convergence Comments should be shorter than the answer, the the reply shorter than the commernt, etc, This avoids the "wall of text" flame war and brings the disagreement to a rapid conclusion.


In short, I've found that the key to maintaining my sanity in online forums is being very selective about what I reply to


Apr 4, 2012

What are some good "Yo Mama" jokes?

Yo momma so ugly, i pushed her face in dough and made gorilla cookies.

Yo momma so fat, she jumped up in the air and got stuck.


Apr 5, 2012

At what has Microsoft failed?

Long list here, i'll take a stab :

Bob was universally reviled and ridiculed.

Vista was a massive financial and technical failure.

Web Servers : Microsoft had high hopes to become the 'backbone of the internet'. They got trounced by Apache/LAMP.


Apr 5, 2012

What was the one thing you didn't know when you got your first dog?

Many - if not most - trainers are still clinging to the discredited theory of "Alpha dominance." That dogs assort themselves into dominance hierarchies, and that you must set yourself as "alpha." This theory was made famous by a researcher - Rudolph Schenkel - who studied wolves in captivity, not in the wild. He later discovered that canines assort themselves into simple family structures. He has recanted his claims, but it seems few people listen : http://www.whole-dog-journal.com/issues/14_12/features/Alpha-Dogs_20416-1.html


Apr 5, 2012

Is Samantha Brick hot or not?

This professional shot seems to show a woman who is, like, fine and stuff. But not beautiful in the sense that would impact her interactions with the world ...


(Note - I posed the question, this answer is really just so I can provide a quick image ...)


Apr 5, 2012

What are some embarrassing "reply all" moments?

Not exactly "reply all", but a startup I worked for on a hiring spree, and lined up about 100 people to come in and interview.

The email invitation was blasted out to the entire list of recipients, all of whom were listed together in the To: line. Thus blowing confidentially right out the window.


Apr 5, 2012

Racial Profiling: How can I block all answers written by Indian-sounding names?

This is an ambitious project. I would get some expert help.

Sudeshna Sarkar from IIT Kharagpur has written an excellent paper on text pattern-matching across languages, http://sites.computer.org/debull/A07mar/sarkar.pdf.

I suggest you email ... oh. Right.

I guess you're on your own.


Apr 10, 2012

South Park (TV series): What are the best Eric Cartman lines?

"Why is that today - everything has involved something going in, or coming out of my ass!" -- Cartman Gets an Anal Probe


Apr 12, 2012

What is some advice for people with high IQs from people with high IQs on Quora?

(I fit your criteria, but won't go into specifics because of my answer)

Forget about IQs.

The IQ test was invented as a broad diagnostic tool for kids who were doing poorly in class.
Some have learning disabilities, some have issues outside the classroom, and some were just bored.

That was all the test was meant for.

The ability to take IQ tests just doesn't translate well into real intellectual ability. A 165 isn't really smarter than a 135 in any important way.

Americans have uniquely seized upon this IQ thing, perhaps due to our obsession with metrics.

Case in point : Marilyn Vos Savant has one of the highest recorded IQs. She's never made any sort of intellectual contribution to humanity, and in fact has done some really stupid things. She wrote a book claiming that Andrew Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was invalid because it used Non Euclidean geometry. She objected that Non Euclidean Geometry wasn't "real".

It was embarassingly stupid.

Genius don't fill in multiple-choice questions trying to best each other.

They come up with much more interesting and productive things to do. Attack an unsolved mathematical conjecture. Write an exciting piece of software. Start blogging. Or think up something so new it doesn't have a name yet ...


Apr 12, 2012

Doom (game series): What is the BFG9000?

Prepare yourself. We must retire to a quiet place and go back.
Way back.

Back before smartphones, before cellphones, before the world wide web.

It's 1993 and Whitney Houston's "I will always love you" is top of the charts. Nobody has heard of Quentin Tarantino.

The most fun a geek could have on his PC was dialing into a Bulletin Board and downloading a nude picture of Kathryn Janeway, Captain of the USS Voyager on Star Trek. For four hours.

Everything changed in December, 1993. A game was released for the PC called Doom. It was free to copy (the first levels). No protection at all.

It was the first "3D 1st-person shooter" : An immersive, 3-dimensional cartoon where you run around blowing up aliens. Doom's engineers had squeezed an amazing amount of graphic performance out of the limited hardware at the time - they leapfrogged other game develops and launched a new genre : a violent, interactive movie.

Within weeks everybody was playing it.

There were a variety of weapons to kill aliens (and your friends) with : shotguns, machine guns, grenades.

And then there was the BFG9000 (Big Fucking Gun 9000). It was no gun : it was a weapon of mass destruction. You didn't even have to aim it, just pull the trigger and it nuked everything in your field of view.

There was no defense, no shield, no amount of health that could stop the BFG9000 (still spoken of in hushed, reverent tones )

So it's 1993. An hour into your download, and you can see Captain Janeway's collar bone. Which doesn't matter because the connection will drop before it finishes, and the photo is fake anyway.

But you're holding the ultimate weapon in the ultimate computer game.

Alas, the engineers also put in 'cheat codes' - special sequences of characters that would let you possess the BFG9000 any time you wanted.

It was too much for any one person to handle. People went mad with power.


Apr 13, 2012

A seagull pooped on my face. What should I do?

Pause and give thanks that cows don't fly.


Apr 16, 2012

What THING has history consigned to the waste bin, made obsolete that you feel most nostalgic for?

Boom box. We used to listen to music together, outside.

Compass. There was a magic to being lost, before the GPS.


Apr 17, 2012

What are some good resources/demos/articles etc. that I can pass along to my 15-year-old sister to pique her interest in programming?

15's pretty old, depending on the person. It may be too late to influence her intellectual development, but maybe not.

I would show her how young programmers are changing the world. Show her The Social Network. Tell her about Rebekah Cox who was promoted rapidly to video game cashier and went on to do something or other with computers.

Invite her to Quora.

Edit : This was my 500th answer on Quora!


Apr 17, 2012

What will be the next "do you remember where you were when" moment?

The last episode of South Park airs.

"Screw you guys, I'm going home!"


Apr 17, 2012

If you were CEO of Facebook, what would you do next? Short term product changes and long term strategy shifts both welcome.

Like any young person crossing into adulthood, it's time to see the world and sort out your romantic life.

Go backpacking in eastern europe, Africa, India. You'll discover a mobile world out there. The next billion users will come online via mobile devices. The future is mobile.

Facebook doesn't really have an awesome mobile experience yet.

OK, you've spent some time to travel the world and evaluate your future. Now it's time to sort out your heart.

"Hey. Microsoft. Yea, um, we need to talk. I appreciate so much what you did when I was younger, the infusion of capital for such a small piece of equity. And I was happy to put a Bing Box right up there. But the world has changed, and let's be honest : Bing's not going to hit the big time. About 15% is all you're gonna get.

And it turns out nobody gives a crap about social search.

And don't get me wrong - your new phone is awesome. Awesome - and too late. People like two choices - coke and pepsi, democrat and republican, paper or plastic. They don't like three. You can come up with the best cola in the world for 5 cents a gallon and nobody cares. Too late.

I just ... need to see other people right now. Remember when you and Apple were dating, and you invested to save them from bankruptcy? Eventually ... Apple had to move on. And so do I."

"Hey. Google. No - don't hang up. I just want to talk.

I know the whole Bing thing hurt you. And we wouldn't let you crawl our data.

I understand about G+. I'd be angry too.

But that was a long time ago, GOOG, and I've been doing some thinking. Microsoft and I just aren't right for each other.

Modesty aside, I'm the biggest thing in social and you're the biggest thing in mobile. The world needs a mobile social net. I need you. You need me. The world needs us. It's destiny.

Maybe we can just hang out? White-board some stuff, no commitments.

People keep missing with location-based social, maybe we can sketch something out that people like? Something, anything.

Talk to me, GOOG."


Apr 17, 2012

Why does sound travel faster in water than air?

To illustrate Joshua Engel's point, consider a slinky versus a broomstick.

You and I hold the ends of a slinky. You slap one end. The wave moves toward me so slowly you can watch it.

Now a broomstick. I feel it almost instantly.

The slinky is compressible.

This also explains another interesting phenomena about water and sound : a hand grenade going off near a ship under water can blow a hole through the steel hull. As with the broomstick, the knock is not just faster but much harder. This is the theory behind depth charges, which sink submarines just by exploding near them.


Apr 17, 2012

What is the funniest statement ever?

I dream of a day when a chicken can cross the road without its motives being called into question. -- Unknown

My reality check bounced. -- Unknown

When you walk a mile in another man's shoes - you're a mile away from him and you've got his shoes! -- Steven Wright

You can't have everything. Where would you put it? -- Steven Wright

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths. -- Steven Wright


Apr 24, 2012

We don't know much about Humpty Dumpty’s life, except that it ends quite tragically. What better ending can you come up with?

Yo. Open your eyes, man.

Humpty Dumpty was pushed!


May 2, 2012

Which nation emerged from World War Two with the greatest honour?

I'm going to get my ass kicked for this, but here goes :

Germany and Japan.

Both of these nations have formally apologized.

Not a word of regret has ever been uttered by the victors for the deliberate targeting of civil populations.

Honor can't exist in the denial of wrong-doing.


May 3, 2012

Where can I get the best burger in the US?

Get thee hence to Five Guys.


May 6, 2012

What are the saddest poems ever?

Byron's lament of lost love, When We Two Parted :

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow--
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well--
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met--
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?--
With silence and tears.


So. Um. You'll excuse me, there's something in my eye ...


May 11, 2012

At what point in it's history was America most vulnerable to invasion and collapse?

During the U.S. Civil War, almost all of our military might had been expended, agriculture and transportation of goods was severely disrupted, a great many southern cities were lain to waste.


May 13, 2012

Would it have been difficult for the United States to plant WMDs in Iraq to prove its invasion was right?

I don't think it would have been hard to plant things like Sarin gas, which doesn't require a lot of infrastructure to make.

I've asked myself the same question. The best I can come up with is : This was Cheney's war - he was the architect of both the WMD story and the 'swarm' military tactics used to topple the Hussein regime.

I don't think Cheney and his band of neocons really cared if the story shook out.
Bush '44 would take the fall for that - they set him up. The oil fields in Iraq were secured and billions went to contractors like Haliburton.

Mission Accomplished.


May 15, 2012

How was it possible for a few prison guards to lead hundreds, often thousands, into gas chambers during the Holocaust?

An illusion of hope.


May 15, 2012

What are some ways to rephrase in a pithy way the following concept, e.g. when making bicycle repairs, if something goes wrong, DO NOT keep working in an attempt to fix it?

Don't fight the bike.


May 15, 2012

What do you call the state where you can't seem to move on, but can't seem to linger either?

Adrift. Neither stationary nor headed anywhere.


May 16, 2012

How do submarines differentiate between friendly and enemy submarines? How do they do this while remaining undetected? Do they listen for the frequency of the propellers? What if the boat is stationary?

In addition to Russell Canty's great answer, subs can get information on expected friendly positions by phoning home via communication channels such as ELF and VLF - low frequency radio which is listen-only.

Subs can pass info back home using underwater acoustical 'telephones' or by surfacing briefly to use conventional radio.


May 18, 2012

What are some of the most heartbreaking facts?

Humans have scanned the skies with radio telescopes for decades.

We have seen no trace of intelligent life.

All empirical evidence points to this : We are totally alone in the cosmos.


May 19, 2012

Why are passive personality traits (direct conflict avoidance, boss-worshipping, nice-guy syndrome) so strong amongst Silicon Valley males?

California in general has a more laid-back culture than, say, New England. People are more civil, less aggressive.

Mistake this for weakness at your peril.


May 20, 2012

What are the hidden gems in Salem, MA?

It's hard to hide anything in a town this small, but it happens!

Red's Sandwich Shop is not to be missed, http://www.redssandwichshop.com/
For 8 bucks you get an amazing meal (not a sandwich). They are so busy with locals they don't appear to want more business. You can walk right by the place and not realize there's even a restaurant there. But look it up and walk in.

Are you short on cash? It's OK, lots of people are. The Howling Wolf sells enormous burritos for 7 or 8 bucks. It's too much food for one person. Split it with a friend - a hearty meal for 3.50.

I'll be back to add items to this as they occur to me ...


May 21, 2012

Do any Americans really care if Bin Laden was unarmed when killed?

I don't think most Americans care.

There is a general sense that this was a "kill mission", there was never any intention to capture Bin Laden. Thinking of George W Bush's remark, "Wanted : Dead or Alive."

He was to be shot dead on sight. I expect most Americans agree with this objective, and shrug off the (possible) cover story that Bin Laden was armed and firing with a wink.


May 21, 2012

If Quora were to have a credit store, what items would be seen there?

Immunity.

For N answers, you can't be downvoted, collapsed, or marked.


May 22, 2012

Why are so many recent college graduates finding it so hard to find jobs?

Because the last time the global economy was this unstable, World War II broke out.

The banking system itself, whole industries and indeed nations - had to be rescued from bankruptcy.


May 24, 2012

How would you explain the collapse of Lehman Brothers to a ten year old?

They borrowed a ton of money and loaned it to homeowners who couldn't repay.

Technically, they bought the loans - didn't loan it directly - but same result.


Jun 3, 2012

What is the real reason the United States waged war against Iraq? Beyond the commonly cited explanation of WMDs, which of the many theories is most credible?

This was Cheney's war. Cheney and his band of neocons had long planned to topple Hussein and establish a western style democracy. This was part of a grander scheme to westernize the Middle East in order to secure the oil supply over the next fifty years. The greatest threat to the western, industrialized world is a dwindling oil supply in the hands of hostile governments, the reasoning goes.

Cheney created a white house culture where questioning the existence of Iraqi WMD's or terrorist ties was viewed as obstructionist trouble-making and would get you fired.

Bush and Blair were duped.

Mission Accomplished.


Jun 4, 2012

What mindset should one possess to be more comfortable when things are miserable? What are some thoughts or even a quote that helps console and bring people back on track?

"When you're going through hell, keep going." -- Winston Churchill


Jun 4, 2012

What are some easy, low-downside actions that one can take to greatly improve their life?

If you live in a city, get a motor scooter. A 50cc motor scooter is a great way to get around in a city. In most cities, you don't have to park it in a legal spot, but can chain it up anywhere like a bicycle. It also blazes through traffic jams and pays for itself in gas savings.

Avoid energy vampires. Negative people, over-talkative people sap your sense of well-being. They don't appreciate your time anyway because they don't appreciate much of anything.

Don't drink too much. The metabolites of alcohol can linger in your body for days.

Lose the urge to impress people with your wit, wealth, power. This is a natural tendency; it's important to grow out of it. Kindness is what makes people like you.

Practice random acts of kindness. Buy that homeless person a coffee and breakfast sandwich. Sit and listen to a street musician for ten minutes. Write a special note of thanks on your napkin for the waitress.

Don't sweat the 5th decimal place. If you make, say, 70K/year - focus on the savings that really matter. That $90 dinner out is easily skipped. Forget saving 2 bucks on a movie ticket, 75 cents on a tank of gas, 5 bucks on a pair of shoes. "But I'll save $500 a year if ....". A year? That's less than 1% of your income.

Let go of any and all grudges. Today. Send them an email and tell them it's water under the bridge and you hope they are well.


Jun 4, 2012

How might a civilization developed by a sapient species that evolved from herbivores instead of omnivores differ from human civilization?

It appears that the transition to carnivore was a critical evolutionary step, coincident with the taming of fire (humans cannot chew or digest raw meat well enough to survive on it). Lacking any natural ability to hunt and kill, we ex-herbivores were forced to develop weapons and language to compensate. This brought the evolutionary pressure towards greater intelligence to new levels.


Jun 4, 2012

How might the world be different if people weren't so prone to overstatement and hyperbole?

It would be a bleak, colorless, dystopian nightmare. The hapless inhabitants would founder, zombie-like, haunted by a dim awareness that an unseen force had murdered passion itself, left it bleeding out on the highway, dying beneath the merciless sun of Accuracy.


Jun 6, 2012

If enough people mailed US Postal Service [prepaid return] junk mail back to senders, would offending businesses stop sending?

It may be more effective to mail it to your senator :)


Jun 6, 2012

How do I communicate with a roommate with Asperger Syndrome to correct inconsiderate behavior?

Some suggestions :

Buy earplugs. (Not to be snarky, but how did this solution escape your notice given your phrase "destroying my life" ? Again, constructively : I sense a hint of histrionics on your part which can sometimes cause people to ignore you.)

Suggest your room-mate get his/her hearing tested. Hearing impairments can make people loud.

Dishes and doors are causing all this noise? Is it possible you are just an early-to-bed type who is easily woken by noise, and your room mate is a night owl? If so, there may be no right or wrong here, you may just be incompatible roomies.


Jun 6, 2012

What restaurants in Salem, MA are good for kids?

The Gulu Gulu Cafe has board games and lots of big picnic tables. It's funky, loud and inviting.

Oneil's is a bar/pub with lots of personalities. When Irish music is playing, lots of families bring their kids who dance around to the fiddles. (check their schedule - http://oneillsofsalem.com/events.html


Jun 6, 2012

Why do so many people endure the mediocrity of Microsoft Windows?

Mediocrity abounds, by definition.


Jun 6, 2012

Where do you turn when no one can answer your Quora question?

To whiskey. Hope is lost.


Jun 18, 2012

I have been heavily recruited by established companies with multiple offers, but was declined a position at Quora where I indicated that I would work without salary. Why?

Maybe Quoran's ... just not that into you.


Jun 18, 2012

I just got my first girlfriend. What do I do now? Where do I take her on our first date?

Chill, brah.


Jun 20, 2012

How can I become better at shipping?

Make a commitment to other people to show/deliver by a certain date.

This creates the social pressure to do things necessary to ship : late nights working, cut corners, make compromises, stop and say "good enough".

This also can help reinvigorate you; anything you make tends to look "meh" by the time you're finishing (version 1.0 at least). Accolades from fresh eyes can reconnect you with your original passion over the idea.


Jun 25, 2012

How do you deal with a manager who doesn't understand the technology you are working on and doesn't respect you or your work?

Steal their job and do it better.


Jun 29, 2012

Why do villains and supervillains insist on going on a diatribe instead of getting down to business?

I will answer this just as soon as I put you into my unnecessarily complex death machine which doesn't work.

Mwuahahahahahahah ....


Jul 2, 2012

Which great movies have low Rotten Tomatoes scores?

The movie which motivated this question was one I just saw,

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

This is one of those rare movies that surpasses good, hops over great, landing squarely in the immortal ground of Important.

RT : 52%/62%

Edit : the movie also contains one of the biggest gaffs ever to make it past the cutting room : Two people set out to cross the Atlantic on a single engine Cessna, which would run out of fuel and splash down before they got even half way.


Jul 3, 2012

What is life like for men older than 35 who choose not to marry?

40, um, something here and never married.

As for the longer lifespan of married men, there's a huge problem here with correlation versus causation. It's pretty clear that both longevity and tendency-to-marry would be negatively affected by some common causes :

Criminal behavior

Poverty/homelessness

Addictions

Compulsive sexual promiscuity

Antisocial behavior : quick to argue or fight. Being a jerk in general.


It's nearly impossible to normalize for these underlying causes. Given this, it's not at all clear that marrying adds a single day to a man's life (while addressing these underlying causes certainly will.) That would be like trying to make it rain by carrying an umbrella.

Anyway, life for me is pretty happy. I've got a great new girlfriend. Given a couple of decades of relationships which ranged from good to disastrous, I feel I was able to choose someone more suited to me and vice versa.

I am free to go out almost all the time, which I do. I work in cafe's, I have a huge tribe of artist/musician/technical friends.


Jul 5, 2012

What would be Thomas Jefferson's biggest criticism of the United States in 2012, were he alive today?

That it exists.

The question asks for speculation, so I shall do so without shame :

Jefferson would claim the current government has violated its mandate to uphold the constitution and personal liberty. He would advocate revolution.

Particularly, Jefferson would point out the erosion of Habeas Corpus under the National Defense Authorization Act and the violation of the War Powers Clause by subsequent War Powers Acts.

He would say something like, "The citizenry are subject to arrest without due process; the world is subject to attack without consent of Congress. We put forth our very lives to secure your liberty; they have since been squandered in the face of threats far less menacing than the British gallows from which we'd have most certainly been hanged ..."


Jul 5, 2012

What do 'typical Americans' do on July 4th?

Drink.
Blow shit up.
Barbeque.
Nod respectfully to veterans who often don uniforms.

In the evening, continue all of the above en mass at a fireworks show.


Jul 5, 2012

What are some good Higgs Boson pick up lines?

It worked for CERN.

Let's collide and try to see God.


Jul 11, 2012

Will Quora overtake Facebook?

Their goals and function are incomparable.

Facebook wants page-views. it attracts them by serving social chatter in mostly short form. quality of content doesn't matter ... its interesting because it came from your friends.

Quora, on the other hand, wants good content without regard to social relevance.

Quora could kill Wikipedia, not Facebook.


Jul 11, 2012

What are some good pranks to play on a fellow astronaut while in outer space?

when it comes time to land, get everyone back on earth to wear ape suits.


Jul 12, 2012

What are some odd, silly, contradictory, or confusing things about your culture/nation?

American suburbs. they seem to me ... A barren wasteland with perfectly manicured lawns.

there is no coffee shop to walk into. no lawn where musicians play. no art. no culture, no anything.

The suburbs seem designed only to drive out of.


Jul 12, 2012

What are some of the biggest myths that have been believed by large numbers of people?

The "Alpha" pack theory of wolves and dogs. That dog owners must win the struggle for "alpha dominance". The researcher who coined this terminology recanted the whole theory, to no avail.

"Women earn 70 cents on the dollar for the same work." In the USA, it's 98 cents. A free market would never let such a disparity exist.

"Paper destroys trees." Trees for paper production are planted and harvested for that purpose.


Jul 12, 2012

Why do most of the people always live in future rather than present?

Hope.


Jul 14, 2012

What are some things that more settled Americans forget about being a 1st generation immigrant?

How confusing, uncertain, and scary it is to deal with people while you don't yet have mastery over their language. Especially when they are impatient.

Something to keep in mind the next time an immigrant behind the counter gives you that "dumb" look and "just can't get it right" and you want to yell at them.

Maybe they screwed up your sandwich. Is that all it takes to make you cruel?


Jul 15, 2012

If everything were in a closet, would nothing be in the closet too?

Yes, but it goes in first and comes out last.


Jul 15, 2012

How can I come to terms with the fact that I will die and that a long life is not a guarantee?

Put it off till the day after.

It's life that needs your attention.


Jul 15, 2012

What is the current thinking about Myers Briggs? Is it considered valid and useful? What are criticisms of it?

Total bunk.


Jul 15, 2012

Who are the most trustworthy people in our society?

The dying.


Jul 15, 2012

Why do so many startups fail?

Competition.. Virtually every idea is being pursued by different start ups, in different ways. Think Facebook, Groupon, Foursquare, Quora.

Each emerged from a field of competitors.


Jul 17, 2012

Is Quora better than Google for answers?

It's meant to be, IMO.

Quora is where you come when you can't find a satisfactory answer on Google.


Jul 17, 2012

Why does Google care so much about an applicant's GPA?

For better or worse, Google is a metric-driven company. All decisions, from hiring to launching, are expected to have a quantifiable justification.


Jul 18, 2012

What qualifies engineers to become CEOs of public companies?

I think engineering experience is a necessary, but not sufficient skill for a CEO of a tech company.

A few thoughts as to why :

Simplicity. Because engineers have to grind out the code, they are ruthless about cutting features. They say No alot. Non technical people invariably want to add their favorite pet feature. This crap accrues until the interface is a mess and the code base unmanageable (I'm looking at you, MySpace-2006. ) When coders rule you get the elegant simplicity of, say, Google's simple box on a plain white page.

Reading tea-leaves. Technical people have an intimate sense of what's coming : "cheap disk storage is going to make photo sharing basically free, BUT we've got to scale the fuck out of those servers ..." "Let's build this like it's a public API, even though it's private. I want to be able to open this to the public with the push of a button."

Habitual, personal commitment to quality. As someone who builds stuff themselves, they are used to showing it to friends. It is a source of pride. For many coders, this is actually a greater motivation than money. This leads to decisions like, "Popup ads? Not on my watch. I'd rather bankrupt the company."

Not in it for the money. Alluded to above, they tend not to sell out, dilute themselves out of existence, or panic about money. They focus on "relentlessly awesome execution" (to steal a phrase someone used to describe facebook.) In the end, if your product is head-and-shoulders above others in awesomeness, you're probably going to win. No matter how many deals you passed up.

Zero tolerance for bullshit. Software is a world of objective reality. A no-spin zone. Vacuous business-speak and other meaningless activity tends to get stepped on.


Jul 19, 2012

Why do people pay 8 bucks for a dessert without second thoughts when they won't pay 99 cents for an iPhone/Android app without thinking hard about whether it’s worth it?

Nobody ever be bought a cookie, only to watch it explode when they picked it up.


Jul 19, 2012

What things would you do with a week vacation to shake off a funk?

Unplug from your regular job. No work during your break, no emails, no phone calls. This time is yours.

Don't party. Alcohol, etc, may be fun at the time but just fuels the funk.

Get some exercise. This lifts energy, mood and creativity I find. It sounds like the place you're going is ideal for hikes in the country side.

Engage your creativity : Whatever your thing is, writing, art, product design ... Take a fresh stab at it.


Jul 21, 2012

What are some of the best things about the 1980s?

A computer of your very own. It's hard to describe how much this affected geeks on a personal level. There wasn't much you could actually do with them; but there was a strong intuitive sense that something very big was happening.


MTV. At first, it was all about the music.


The walkman. Think of it as an ipod that holds 12 songs on audio tape.


"Blitzkrieg" Boris Becker. This young tennis star stunned the world (and the tennis masters) with his speed and his willingness to land on his face. More than once he walked off the court bloodied - and victorious.


Video arcades. A perfect example of the "Wealth of Paucity" - it was only possible to play these games at an arcade. You had to get out of the house to play.


The Brat Pack. I know, I know. But it was cool having this young group of actors who worked so well together, it was a big part of the zeitgeist.


Real beer. Home-brewing was legalized in 1978, this led to an explosion in craft brews.


Skin-tight Calvin Klein jeans. Imagine being a straight male trying to get through your teens surrounded by girls in these. (Brooke Shields gets honorable mention too.)


College rock : The subversive seed of "Alternative Rock", college radio stations began breaking new bands that couldn't get on mainstream radio. REM and others broke out this way.

The Smiths :


The Cure :


The Compact Disc (which was often called 'laser disc', at first.) No. Distortion. At. All.

Amusingly, FM stations would brag that they are playing a song "on laser disc".
Which was kind of silly given that FM can't transmit anywhere near the fidelity of a CD. But once you got one home and tried it - it was an OMG experience.


The hopeless American olympic hockey team beats the powerhouse Soviet team in the "Miracle on Ice." The cold war was very much on in those days - this was a big deal.


Back to the Future. Think of it as "The best mindless blockbuster ever made."
97% on RT. Some critic reviews :
"Probably the most carefully-scripted blockbuster in Hollywood history."
"Delightful and sophisticated to a degree beyond the dreams of today's movies in similar vein."
"Back to the Future is one of the best popcorn movies ever made. It's ingenuity, time-traveling twist ups and wonderfully vibrant characters resonate in ways few films ever achieve."


Jul 21, 2012

Göbekli Tepe: What is the best (scientific) book or documentary about Göbekli Tepe?

There is a documentary which was shown at some film festivals : http://worldsfirsttemple.com/


Jul 22, 2012

Does Boston Mayor Thomas Menino have the power to block Chick-Fil-A from doing business in Boston?

I don't think the mayor possesses any legal authority to keep a lawful business out.

But it can be done - especially in Boston. It's still a very provincial city, a lot of things happen over a handshake, a wink, and sometimes a bribe.

Menino can make a lot of things go wrong for Chick Fil-A. Inspectors can become impossible to please, license applications can get lost, delayed and denied. Protestors can be summoned with a phone call.

Unfair? You betcha. But that's how it is.


Jul 23, 2012

Saving Money (thrift): What are some products that have easy-to-make and significantly cheaper substitutes?

Antacid : Just use some baking soda or eat a banana.

Mosquito Repellant : Rub a dryer sheet on your clothes and skin.

"After-bite" treatment for mosquito bites : This stuff is just ammonia. Some ammonia-based window cleaner works as well. Or - apply a dab of tooth-paste. The menthol in toothpaste also acts to relieve the itch.


Jul 23, 2012

Is communism good or bad?

As a student in college, I worked in the cafeteria. It was a typical prepaid meal-plan, no cash register - the kids came in and took whatever they want.

I was restocking the jello and a cafeteria worker said, "Put the lemon jello out. Nobody likes it. We won't have to restock it as often."

That's what's wrong with communism. Lemon Jello.


Jul 23, 2012

How do I get funding and mentorship for my startup from Silicon Valley angels and VC's if I live outside of the USA?

In my experience, VC's aren't interested in small seed-sized investments. They've got too much money to manage and it's just too much work keeping track of a thousand little startups.

You can put together a video pitch (make it good!) and research active Angels in the valley. Sometimes, it's best not to ask for money but simply advice. Everyone loves to give the latter :)

Also give Y Combinator a look ...


Jul 23, 2012

What are some of the worst things about the 2000s?

The Great Recession : The sub-prime mortgage crisis, the rise of derivatives/mortgage-backed securities, destabilization of the global financial system.

The flooding of New Orleans : The greatest nation on earth couldn't evacuate a city.

The invasion of Iraq failing to turn up any WMD's.

"Reality TV" - which was pretty good when it was based in reality (The Deadliest Catch") but took an unreal turn into contrived, bizarre live-in game shows.


Jul 23, 2012

What are cool and inexpensive home science experiments I can do to blow my son's mind?

Make a Voltaic Pile (battery), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile.
You need pennies, nickles, paper towels and salt water. Arrange the coins as shown in the picture, with a brine-soaked paper towel between each coin-gap.
Using two wires at top and bottom, and touching them to your tongue, you can feel the current. Make one big enough (or connect up a few together), and you can light up a bulb.


Oh - and buy a telescope.


Jul 24, 2012

Is Boston Mayor Thomas Menino right to vow to block Chik-Fil-A from opening in Boston, due to their public opposition to same-sex marriage rights?

I had never seen 50 police cars in one place before.

It was 1980 in my small home town of Norwich, CT. I was about to get the best civics lesson of my life.

The Ku Klux Klan was losing membership down south, and decided to come up north to do some recruitment. They wanted to hold a rally at a baseball field in Mohegan Park.

There was a legal scuffle, but ultimately the KKK's right to peaceably assemble and demonstrate was upheld.

So they came.

The baseball field was a 10 minute walk through the woods from my house. My father ordered me to stay away. I disobeyed and went anyway.

The local paper sat on our table. The front page that day said only this - in big bold type - and nothing else :

Unwanted. Uninvited. Scum.

I left the house, faked heading toward town, then changed direction toward the rally.

Half-way there I ran into two African-American kids (we just said 'black' back then), about my age. I said, "Are you going to the rally?" They just said, "Yeah." And there was this deadly pause. I wanted to say something like what the newspaper said. I didn't know how to. I guess I felt ashamed.

I came over the hill and saw the police cars neatly parked in an array. I counted fifty exactly.

There was a wall of police - about 200 of them - in full riot gear : shields, helmets, batons. They formed an unbreachable barricade.

There were about 400 angry protestors yelling and chanting. Occasionally an object would get tossed over the police barricade, but nothing hit its mark.

In the middle of all this - six KKK guys. They were saying something through a bullhorn but you couldn't hear them over the crowd. They did not have their hoods on.

They were surrounded and appeared scared shitless.

15 minutes into their 'rally', they gave up. Police warned the crowd not to interfere with their departure or follow them. Nobody did.

As they threw in the towel, there were cheers and chants of "And stay the fuck out!"

And stay the fuck out they did. We never heard from them again.

I said this was a big civics lesson for me. I learned :

The right to free expression must be granted to everyone - even those we find despicable - otherwise it is not a right at all. The KKK was allowed to rally in order to preserve the rights of everyone.

The rebuke of the community is stronger than the politician's pen. City officials may have succeeded in preventing the KKK from coming. But only the community - that scene i witnessed in the baseball park - could make them not want to come.


The skies do not fall when we defend the right of expression for bigots. Democracy is messy, offensive and noisy.

We musn't try to silence hatred, rather we must answer it.


Jul 24, 2012

Have the Apollo conspiracy theorists now accepted they are wrong?

I haven't come across a single one of them recanting.

Which is strange. MIT had been bouncing laser beams off mirrors installed on the moon by Apollo 11 for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

If the moon landings were a hoax, the Soviets would have bounced their own beam up there and exposed it.


Jul 25, 2012

Are there situations for which an irrational approach generally leads to a better outcome?

In game theory, the The Prisoner's Dilemma where two or more people must irrationality cooperate to get the best personal outcome.

If that sounds impossible - you're sane. The Prisoner's Dilemma is counter-intuitive as hell.


Jul 26, 2012

Why do most speed limits in the USA end in a 5 instead of a 0?

This could be an artifact of the legislative process; people naturally prefer multiples of ten. It's easy to imagine one group who wants the speed limit to be n*10, another wants (n+1)*10, and they settle on the compromise (n+1/2)*10 .


Jul 26, 2012

Are there any examples of things that were designed poorly, but are so ubiquitous that replacing them with a better design is almost impossible?

The ghastly English system of measures - abandoned by England - but still in use here in the United States.


Jul 26, 2012

What does it feel like to get struck by lightning?

I was not struck directly, but for that reason my account here might be of some interest. Since I was not stunned, I had a chance to observe perhaps better than someone directly zorched.

I was asleep at my house when I was 15. Lightening struck just outside my bedroom window. It took me a while to figure out that was what happened.

What I experienced was this : A booming, screaming jumbo jet burst out of the ground and retreated into the sky. I could distinctly hear it retreat. My first thought was, inexplicably, a jet aircraft had done just that.

I had to think about the physics of that - it makes perfect sense. The lightening bolt appears from sky to ground nearly instantaneously. So the sound from the nearest point - here on the ground - comes first and loudest.

Then new sound comes from further up the bolt, less intense and a bit later. And so it goes all the way up to the clouds.

The effect is this auditory illusion - exactly like an explosion ascending into the sky.

(I have some slight hearing loss, probably as a result of this incident. Every outlet in the room ejected its plug, but i don't think there was any other damage. I guess the lightening followed the grounding wires/pipes into the ground.)


Jul 27, 2012

What is the relationship between algorithms and programming? How do they interrelate when writing high-end applications?

I think you're getting tangled up in terminology.

Algorithms are everywhere, they are the heart of programming. There are no rules of thumb as to "How do I pick which one?" etc.

Forget the word algorithms for now, altogether. Learn to program and all will be become clear.


Jul 30, 2012

Are humans causing global warming?

This graph. It certainly appears that the earth is warming right on schedule, as it has always done, long before humans burned hydrocarbons.


Jul 31, 2012

What are the parallels between "The Dark Knight Rises" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"?

The villain is a "looter", in Rand's parlance. He literally "hangs the rich". He's like Wesley Mouch on steroids.


Jul 31, 2012

What are motivating ways to introduce General Vector spaces?

What Patrick Reilly said, Fourier Analysis is cool because it gives you a musical synthesizer!

There's even an app for that : http://moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog-iphone/


Aug 2, 2012

Which single event left the most indelible mark on the American psyche?

Woodstock.

Woodstock heralded a dramatic new social dynamic in the United States : the emergence of the "Generation Gap."

In the 1940's and before, there really wasn't this notion of "generation". Kids dressed as their parents did, listened to the same music, held pretty much the same values. Corporations didn't generally target them as a separate demographic.

The first cracks between the generations began in the post-war 50's with the beatniks and Elvis. Kids were dressing different and listening to different music.

This generation "crack" collided with a senseless land war in South East Asia, with a nuclear arms race threatening to destroy humanity, with the Pill ... with a dozen things.

The crack became a chasm as a new generation flatly rejected the values of their elders. They openly called for the overthrow of their government. "Never trust anyone over 30" was their battle cry. Authority figures from the President to the local cop were simply called "Pigs".

In a freakish and unpredictable act of "generational identification", 500,000 of them showed up for a music festival in an obscure town in New York.

Another million tried to go but ended up stuck in traffic.

Unrecognizable to their elders in both appearance and beliefs, in a sense this was the first new and distinct American generation. They came to Woodstock to announce and celebrate themselves.

We've been naming each new generation ever since.

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "tell me, where are you going?"
This he told me :
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
got to get back to the land
And set my soul free.
...
By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber-death-planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.
We are stardust.
Billion year old carbon.
We are golden..
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.


--Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Aug 2, 2012

What emotions are Piet Mondrian's 'Composition' series of paintings supposed to evoke in the viewer?

In his book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung argues that art exists to express emotions that language cannot capture.

He says, "We know more than we can tell."


Aug 3, 2012

A nuclear bomb has just been detonated. I escape the blast, but the fallout is headed my way. What do I do? Is elevation good or bad? Would a gas mask help? How long will it take for the fallout to dissipate?

The instructions given to soldiers were, according to my fuzzy recollection : shield your body and your eyes during the flash (duck into your trench). This protected against the initial blast of blinding light and ionizing radiation.

Then - assuming you are a safe distance from the heat, about which little can be done - brace for the blast. In an urban environment the biggest threat is flying glass. This is where "duck and cover" helps. You don't want to be bleeding from 1000 cuts in a town without bandages or antiobiotics. On the battlefield ... just stay in your trench.

Cover your nose and mouth with wet cloth. A surgical mask is even better. This prevents you from inhaling any radioactive dust.

At this point, again according to my unsubstantiated and fuzzy recollection - you're pretty safe. Most of the radiation in the environment is stopped by a layer of cloth, so bundle up. Don't inhale unfiltered air and don't eat or drink anything.

And get the fuck out :) I imagine an offroad motorcycle is your best bet; remember to bring couple cans of fix-o-flat as you're likely to puncture a tire on some debris.

Leave now because not only is fallout on its way, but a firestorm is also spreading .

When you get to where you're headed, immediately shed all your clothes and shower. Goggles for your eyes and a clothespin for your nose might help keep radioactive water from being ingested.


Aug 3, 2012

How did Google go from a small university project to the company they are today?

A few things :

They accidentally found a better ranking algorithm.

Originally they set out to search academic papers. In academe, the quality of a paper is often adjudged by the number of times it has been cited in other papers.

In web parlance, by the number of link-backs. At the time, a typical search engine worked by counting occurrences of search words.

The latter was especially gameable: just dump all sorts of common search terms into your document. Which spammers did. Man, did they.

Link-backs are harder to create, and a good measure of quality. At a time when spam was flooding search results, Google was able to keep it relevant.

Nobody would buy them.

They tried to sell their search engine for a million bucks. No takers. (Retroactive face-palm all around.)

They realized that search would "monetize" the web, and built an awesome platform for advertisers (AdSense.)

They stayed the course and didn't get greedy. Imagine what a square inch of white-space on that landing page could sell for! (Looking at you, yahoo.)
They didn't succumb to that temptation, and kept paid search results distinct and unobtrusive.


Aug 3, 2012

How does one deal with the fallout from falling victim to quicksand after their first gay sexual encounter?

What Dan Holliday said. It's the same for straight guys like me.

There is an almost unbearable intensity, especially the first time. You feel elated, connected, alive, scared ... You can think of nothing else. Their slightest touch is like a thunderbolt. Minutes feel like months.

Know this : these feelings aren't coming from them, they are coming from inside you. They are internal. They'll come again. You're feeling your own capacity for love.

The important thing is to shield the other person from the intensity and urgency of your feelings. Fake being chill. It's not easy.

Welcome to the game.


Aug 4, 2012

I am currently studying to become a Software Engineer. What would make me more employable: Becoming extremely proficient in one language, or becoming efficient at multiple languages?

Don't worry about getting fast in multiple languages. But do : pick a 'home' language and learn it *cold*. Use it so much your fingers handle the syntax for you, your eyes are automatic bug-catchers. C++ is still a choice, but java or python get much respect, and really any widely used language will do.

Also learn about the different *types* of languages. Imperative, declarative, functional. Compiled, interpreted. Frameworks like ROR. Client-centric, server-centric.


Aug 5, 2012

What would you like on a IM Social Networking application on iPhone & Android?

Shaken, not pressed.

When a text notification comes up i'd like to be able to read it by flicking my phone to the left.

Then I'd like to able to answer
by voice.


Aug 5, 2012

Is it OK to drink scotch through a straw?

Fuck no.


Aug 6, 2012

Why are people upset by terms like "rockstar/ninja programmer"? Do they think that there is something wrong about the trend of technology becoming cool? If so, is there a better term that people should be using to describe a talented developer?

Those terms are hyperbolic, overused, and culture-deaf.

Devs dont talk that way. They never did. It's the manic babble of advertisers, recruiters and mainstream media.

In earlier times, the term "whiz" would have been applied to Edison or Einstein. (it was.)


Aug 6, 2012

What are the best English neologisms since 1990?

Sock puppet.


Aug 6, 2012

What are the three qualities you liked most about the best manager you ever had?

Their absence in time, space and email.


Aug 6, 2012

What would you really like to be invented?

Real Time Yelp.

How is the band tonight? How long is the wait for a table? What menu items are out of stock?


Aug 6, 2012

Animal Behavior: What do hipsters eat?

Anything at 350 degrees or higher.

They eat things ... before they are cool.


Aug 6, 2012

How does a startup get more followers on AngelList?

Detach horse.

Reposition horse in front of cart.

Re-attach horse.


Not filling out your profile because there are no followers is like taking your guitar to a park bench and refusing to play because nobody is listening yet.


Aug 6, 2012

Why don't Mars rovers move faster?

That thing's solar powered, right? There are probably some serious energy constraints as well.

Edit : No, it isn't solar powered. It's powered by Plutonium. Thanks to Matthew Baldwin and Andy McFarland.


Aug 6, 2012

Stand-Up Comedy: What are the best examples of comedians dealing with hecklers?

It's old as dirt but never loses its punch :

"Hey! I'm working here! Do I show up at your job and screw with the french fry machine ???"


Aug 6, 2012

Do I have to get a Mac to develop with Ruby on Rails?

Ubuntu generally works out of the box. It's worth getting past any glitches you may be having, because the LAMP/ROR support is awesome.

And the community is always helpful.

Inbox me and I'd be happy to try and sort things out.

Also, you might like to develop in the cloud on a platform like Linode.


Aug 7, 2012

Why does the United States no longer declare war?

The Bomb.

The Cold War.

Inertia.


The creation of nuclear weapons in 1945 by the US (and 1949 by the Soviets) created a situation where there would not be time to get a formal declaration of war. A nuclear war would be over before Congress could even convene - just a few hours.

To deal with this, the Office of the President interpreted the phrase in the constitution "commander in chief of the armed forces" to mean the President could deploy the military without a declaration of war.

So both the President and the Soviet Premier had their finger on the button with no intervening parliamentary consent required.

Now the two nuclear super-powers were at a standoff, and The Cold War was well underway. The two sides then engaged in a series of covert and proxy wars.

Basically, the argument was made that the US president must be at parity with the Soviet Premiere. S/he must be able to react just as quickly and just as sneakily.

So Korea and Vietnam were "police actions", and the bombing of Laos was conducted entirely in secret.

After the miserable experience of the Vietnam War, congress attempted to reign in the power of the President via the War Powers Act of 1973. This prevented the President from secretly deploying troops and imposed a 60 day time limit on military actions conducted without congressional approval. (This was quite a constitutional showdown; Congress over-rode a presidential veto of the act.)

Forgive me some editorializing; during the cold war all of this perhaps made sense. And certainly we have to give the president authority to launch nukes in relation for a nuclear strike.

But now that the cold war is over and well, there is an old scrap of paper in a dumpster somewhere in DC which says,

"Congress shall have the power to declare war."


Which seems pretty…unambiguous to me anyway.


Aug 7, 2012

History of Technology: What are some systems we live with today that were designed for a world of the past?

The Caps Lock key exists now only to mess up passwords.

The wifi-off key on laptops exists now just to knock us offline.

Our educational system was designed to produce an intellectually passive, docile, minimally literate factory worker.



Aug 7, 2012

How do I enable wifi hot spot in my Iphone 3GS phone like the Iphone 4?

Jailbreak that puppy, and install the TetherMe app from Cydia.


Aug 7, 2012

Is it true, as Steve Jobs claims, that Apple doesn't have committees?

Never worked there, but i'll give it a shot :

Yes but not literally. I'm sure there are committees in Apple doing ... something.

But not designing product. What Jobs meant is Apple does not design by consensus. (Or by market research, or by metrics, or user feedback.) They design according to the aesthetics of a single person.

One guy's hunch.

That it works so astonishingly well is a lesson nobody else seems ready or able to absorb.


Aug 7, 2012

Why do we care about the Puritans in American history?

It's about origins. Unlike the Jamestown settlement, who came here to get rich (and starved in the process), the Puritans were the first Europeans who came here to settle permanently.

In a sense they were the first Americans. 25% of the modern population of the US is descended from Puritans aboard the Mayflower.


Aug 8, 2012

Would you support a petition to legalize polygamous marriage in the United States? Why or why not?

Yea, strictly on the libertarian principle that people should be able to do what they want so long as it doesn't hurt others.

And I mean direct harm; not the "Oh! But you're damaging the values of society and subverting our culture ... " which can apply to anything at all.

Let em do their thing, shack up in Geodome, whatever. What do we care? The number of folks who actually want to do this sort of thing is a very small percentage of the population anyway, I believe.


Aug 9, 2012

Why is it that celebrities seem to overdose only in hotels, rather than in their or their friends' houses?

Another possibility :

At home there are likely to be people who would inhibit their drug use : family, friends, even permanent staff.


Aug 11, 2012

Is a scooter more dangerous than a bicycle?

Bicycles are safer; they are lighter (much), more maneuverable, and have lower average speed, higher clearance and limited range.

However, the question is a bit like asking which is safer : rafts or crabbing boats. Rafts, of course, because you really can't
take them far.


Aug 11, 2012

Buddy Scooter: How do I charge the battery?

See owner's manual for battery removal. Sears and Walmart carry motorcycle chargers for 30ish bucks. Follow directions on charger.

DO NOT USE A CAR BATTERY CHARGER, YOUR BATTERY WILL EXPLODE.

Also, if you can kick start/ pop start/ push the scoot (or take the batt out), many motorcycle shops will charge it for a small fee.

But do buy a charger, many a battery has gone dead and needed replacing after an idle winter.


Aug 11, 2012

Where is the screw to control your air/fuel mixture in a Vespa pk 50 xl located?

This could also be due to water in your air box, from either a crack in the box or heavy rain. You can remove the foam and dry it out.

Or it could be the fuel-air mix. It's the first google hit so I won't give that info here.


Aug 11, 2012

What is it like to own a Vespa?

They're cool, well built, not the best value though. Better overall performance and durability come from Japan and taiwan (kymco)

Just my thing, vespa fans, reasonable people will differ.


Aug 11, 2012

How many lines of code do professional programmers write per hour?

As others have said, lines-of-code isn't just a bad metric, it is a non metric.

Bill Gates said, "measuring lines of code is like judging the quality of an aircraft by weighing it."

Show me not what how many lines you wrote, but how many lines you saved (or what functionality you added.)

Don't count lines. Don't count lines. Don't count lines.

And if you ever get a chance, mention this to the big tech firms, almost all of which measure engineer performance by lines checked in.

PS : you say you're just learning python. Put down the stopwatch and let the mojo of python fill you. If you whip through a language u can lose the big picture.

The fastest coders are usually not the best.


Aug 13, 2012

What would happen if the entire US military budget were instead invested in education?

Education is actually a big part of the problem.

One of the essential roles of education is political indoctrination to produce soldiers. Students are taught that they were born under the best flag ever, that their nation's values are the only good and right thing. They are presented with mythologized heroes who lived and usually died for the sake of country.

It's true everywhere, from a grammar school in Kentucky to a madras in afghanistan.

I was a young student when I was taught about US "Manifest Destiny" - our God-given mandate to seize all the land from coast to coast, driving native populations to extinction. I said, "that's exactly what the Nazi's said. They called it lieberstrom". I was thrown out of class and almost suspended.

Oppressive regimes have been especially adept at leveraging education as their most basic propaganda tool.

An interesting question is : how can education be changed so that war is less like in future generations?


Aug 13, 2012

What slogan would make you want to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken?

"You stay out of our kitchen, we stay out of your bedroom. "


Aug 14, 2012

Should America have fought in the Vietnam War?

Agree with others : No.

Dean Rusk, architect of the war, almost had a nervous breakdown and resigned. He later described the fundamental errors the US made :

The US thought Vietnam was a puppet of China which itself was a puppet of the Soviet Union. Only in retrospect did it become clear that Vietnamese communism was very different than Soviet and Chinese communism and posed no threat to the United States. This was made very clear when, after defeating the Americans (we can say it), Vietnam turned around and went to war with China.

The US underestimated the resolve of the North Vietnamese. North Vietnam knew they didn't have to win; they only had to not lose. Eventually, America would grow weary and withdraw. Hanoi and other cities could be blown off the map and the North Vietnamese would not surrender.

The Gulf of Tonkien incident was a panicky radar operator; there had been no attack on an American ship.


Aug 15, 2012

How fast can I expect a 50CC moped to go?

50 cc's come off the line restricted to a max speed of 30MPH (in the US anyway.)
This is one of the criteria for it not to be considered a motorcycle, and thus exempt from registration, insurance and parking regulations.

Lots of people "derestrict" their scoots themselves, and many dealers will remove it for you with a "we never did this" wink.

43 is the top speed I have generally seen for different types of 4-stroke scooters.
I'm sure there are some exceptions but this seems to be the general rule.

In my opinion, a restricted scooter is less safe. 20-30MPH is the 'bermuda triangle' : too fast for the side of the road or bike lane, too slow for traffic.

Perhaps someone else can provide an answer for 2-stroke scooters, which are more powerful.


Aug 15, 2012

What is the single biggest problem users have with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7?

Cholla i


Aug 21, 2012

Should I teach my 12-year-old child HTML or Python?

I don't know if this is good advice for all 12 year-old's, but here's a thought :

Drop the word 'child'. Banish it from your vocabulary, your thinking, your philosophy.

Think 'young person'. Trust in this young person to explore and discover their own interests. They may be totally different than yours. They may not appear potentially profitable. That's OK. This person is not you. Their future is not yours to sculpt and shape. Get behind them and let them lead.

Help where you can. If they like music, get them an instrument. Maybe they'll lose interest. That's OK, it's part of exploration.

If they take an interest in software, it is likely they will tell you what they need. They may even teach you a thing or two in short order.

Encourage and support this young person as they discover their talents and interests, whatever they are.


Aug 22, 2012

Why should we redistribute wealth to poor people? Is it the moral thing to do? Or just the western Christian thing to do? Do we do it because it stimulates the economy?

Because even the poorest man can build a guilloutine.


Aug 22, 2012

Who are the most impressive all-around individuals alive today and why?

You've never heard of them. They teach in the inner cities, work in emergency rooms, vaccinate children in war zones, and so on.

They wake up each day and set about the unglamorous and uncomfortable work of making a difference.


Aug 23, 2012

What are the alternatives for paid apps?

One alternative is to build a mobile web app.


Aug 23, 2012

If we look at a star millions of light-years away, which we have done, the light takes millions of years to get to us, so we are looking millions of years backwards in time. Using this reasoning, what is the furthest we could look backwards in time?

It's a fine point, but Relativity does away with the notion of absolute time. When we look at a distant star, we are seeing it as it is NOW from our reference frame.


Aug 24, 2012

Considering Andy Warhols quote. "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Will people have more than fifteen minutes of fame or less, in this age of social media?

Prior to social media, fame was absolute : you had it, or you didn't.

There was a media bottleneck : 100 or so people were served up to us as 'famous' on TV, radio, magazines. A few corporations controlled the whole show : you were famous when they said you were.

In the age of social media, fame is neither binary nor centrally controlled. Now : everybody is famous all the time, just to differing degrees.

You can have 100 followers, 10,000 or ten million. And never sell a single bottle of shampoo.


Aug 25, 2012

Should I patent my web application that provides a novel function and is currently in development?

This has been addressed on quora lots of times, short answer : No. A patent will take three + years, cost 10-50k, and then you'd have to spend much more to enforce it, and you'd probably lose.

If you want, you can go ahead and file a Provisional Patent Application yourself for 200 bucks. Just write a white paper about your app. Read up a bit on patent 'claims' and try to specify what makes your idea novel and useful. Differentiate from existing products.

This is a good exercise anyway, the white paper can be part of your investor pitch. Send it off to the USPTO and get back to work :)


Aug 25, 2012

Irony: What are the most ironic articles, blogs, or images on the internet?

This headline:

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-24/news/mn-23690_1_gender-sensitivity


Aug 25, 2012

What is the best example of a movie's or book’s title being worked into the actual film or book?

"We've got to get you ... Back to the future!!"


Aug 25, 2012

What are some of the biggest lies ever told?

You seem nice, so we made you a big wooden horse.


Aug 26, 2012

Is it normal for the investors' lawyers to request full access to the founders' email in a due-diligence?

That is undue diligence. It is a very troublesome indicator the investor (and his lawyer) don't know what they're doing and are comfortable making insane demands that a simple gut-check should have nixed.

Of course you should refuse, and almost certainly walk away. If they do drop the request, at the very least you should bring up your concern that future dealings with them will be tainted by distrust and lawyers-gone-wild. Insist on being persuaded this won't be the case.

Taking money from the wrong people is worse than needing it. The latter is fixable.


Aug 30, 2012

Dev Bootcamp: Should a person who wants to start an internet startup learn to program?

Yes.

The Van Winklevoss twins can back me up on this.


Aug 31, 2012

How different will our lives be when we actually discover life on another planet?

I think finding life on another planet will herald a discontinuous leap in Human consciousness. Whether it's intelligent or primitive.

Scientifically, it's a virtual guarantee that we’re either all alone or there are billions of other planets with life. Nature can make just one of something - a supremely improbable singularity. But not just two. Of course it's possible, but we'd expect the count to be either 1 or a great multitude.

So if life is spotted anywhere else, we can reasonably surmise it’s all over the place. The human race could become suddenly ...
Cosmically Self-Conscious:

We might begin to worry what impression we make on other forms of intelligence. How many people do we have without sufficient water, food, and basic health care? Oh man - we can't have starving babies showing up on the Galactic Teletron. Can we get some supply lines set up?

Hey - you two. Over there. Stop fighting. Looks bad. Can we get some peace-keepers up in this?

We may be fearful : Fuck! The universe is crawling with life! Are they coming for us?

We may learn some disturbing things :
"Here's video of your planet from 3000BC to present. Sorry, none of your religions are valid except Mormonism. Heh - just kidding. They're all wrong. And immortality is trivial - just don't masturbate."

And - just as when Europeans discovered the New World - there will be some, a few at first, who must get out there. It doesn't matter how dangerous it is, how long it takes. Or even if they can never return.

They'll sail their ship to new lands.


Aug 31, 2012

Mathematics: What is the most beautiful theorem proof, and why?

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Counterintuitive, stunning in its implications, a devilish bomb that blows up mathematics itself with an exquisite variation on the old paradox, "this sentence is false."


Sep 2, 2012

What are the best resources to get a basic understanding of AI?

In a sense, there is none. Artificial intelligence can be described as "the set of algorithms that make us say Wow."

It's a catch-all term for algorithms which once seemed impossible (chess, facial recognition) or still are (having a meaningful conversation).

The entire field is rather a heterogeneous grab-bag of Wows.

No single effective model of intelligence exists yet.


Sep 6, 2012

What would happen if the United States suffered an economic meltdown?

A lot like this :


and also this :


and maybe even that :


Economists (outside the US) tell a joke : ":When America sneezes, the whole world catches cold."


Sep 7, 2012

What are good ways available to avoid over heating problem with Ubuntu 12.04?

the original 12.04 kernel release turned off some power-saving features in the CPU, leading to over-heating.

You need to update your kernel to 3.4 from 3.2. Not sure if that is an update to 12.04 or what, but that should point you in the right direction.

Let me know how you make out, the Ubuntu community watches out for its own!


Sep 17, 2012

What are easy ways to make a motor scooter go faster?

First, derestrict it. Scooters in the USA have various hacks installed to keep the bike under 30 MPH. Most of them restrict airflow to the engine. Most scoot shops will do this for you with a wink when you buy the thing. Otherwise, a mechanic can usually do it in an hour or less. Do-it-yourself-ers can google.

This gets you up to 37-43 MPH (50 cc).

Next, put in mobile one synthetic motor oil. You'll get a bit more top end and acceleration.

Find the fuel/air screw on the carburetor and experiment with it to find the optimal setting. Most scooters are set too 'lean'.

For even more power, you can install a high flow air filter. Remove that big air box and replace with a small high flow filter. This may require you to rejet your carb (best done by experienced hands)

A high performance muffler will further help with airflow, thus power.


Sep 17, 2012

What is it like to smoke an electronic cigarette?

Just started using these, tried all of the following brands : NJoy, Logic, Smoke For Life. Normally I'm a 1-1.5 pack a day smoker. I use the menthol e-cigs.

All three brands were roughly the same experience : It's almost exactly like smoking. They are actually a bit harsher on the back of the throat than real smoke. The nicotine kick isn't quite as pronounced, and I find myself taking longer drags and holding in the vapor to get the same fix.

10 or so sizable hits off this thing and my craving for a smoke is fully satisfied.

However, the satiated feeling doesn't seem to last as long, and the cravings return sooner than they would for a real smoke.

Conclusion : Most satisfying nicotine substitute I have ever tried, by far. My consumption of real cigs has dropped off drastically.


Sep 17, 2012

What does smoking cigarettes feel like, and should I try it?

NO, YOU SHOULD NOT FUCKING TRY IT!

Ahem. Sorry. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known.

How does it feel? At first it's hard, it's hard not to cough, and gives you a giddy, dizzy feeling.

Keep at it with any sort of regularity for a month or so, and suddenly ... you don't feel right when it's been too long without one. In the morning. After some stress.

Your muscles tense up a bit (especially the jaw), you become irritable and distracted and some weird circuit in your brain keeps shouting for a cigarette.

Everyone thinks they are immune to such addiction. But - the urge is relentless. Hours, days, weeks, it gnaws and gnaws until it wears you down.

It's a massive health problem waiting to strike. Skip that first one and you'll never have to worry about it.

Have a look at Nicotine's placement in this graph - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependence.svg.


Sep 18, 2012

My friend wants me to go to a party and get drunk, but I don't want to. What should I do?

Insist they smoke crack with you. Act offended when they decline (hopefully).


Sep 18, 2012

What does nicotine withdrawal feel like?

It's really not that bad, minute-to-minute. It's the duration that's difficult, a good week of acute symptoms, after which sudden and powerful cravings may come around for quite some time.

In that first week, of course, your brain keeps shouting "cigarette! cigarette! cigarette!". In addition to this overt psychological effect, a bunch of other stuff is to be expected :

Decreased alertness, focus and energy. Your brain is low on dopamine and it slows you down.

Respiratory changes : This can range from a pleasant, inhaling-ice-cool-air sensation to a really nasty, productive cough.

Increased appetite : Nicotine suppresses appetite. Various digestive disturbances are also common. You might crave weird food.

Sleep disturbances : you may feel tired, but have difficulty sleeping. Or you may sleep a whole lot.

Anger : Tiny things will tend to set you off. It's best not to express anger to anyone over anything during this period (week 1). Say nothing and walk it off.

Muscle tension, especially in the jaw, shoulders and neck.


To overstep a bit and offer some advice, don't expect too much from yourself during this period. Cut yourself some slack. Sleep if you need to, eat if you feel like it, take some time off if you can. Hang out in places where a smoke break doesn't make sense (like the movies.) Purge your home of all lighters and ashtrays. Joining a support group has been proven effective. If the cravings get too bad, there are options like Chantix (ask your doc) or nicotine gum.

It's not easy, but it's not that hard either. It's nothing compared to a single round of chemotherapy.

You can do it. Millions have.


Sep 19, 2012

What are some of the most disgusting photos ever taken?


This photo, taken by a journalist in Boston with quick reflexes, so appalled the city (and the world) that it forced Boston to take real steps to address the issue of racism.

Entitled “The soiling of old glory”, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977.

The attacker is a man from South Boston who was demonstrating against forced busing. The victim in his suit is simply a young attorney who was going about his business. The attacker grabbed the nearest available weapon, an American Flag. Painfully poignant, offensive on so many levels.

It should be noted that the guy behind the victim appears to be restraining him, but is actually helping him up and trying to move him to safety.

The victim was not seriously injured and went on to become a successful attorney, activitist, and city official. The attacker was arrested, served time, and afterwards was hectored out of Massachusetts. He lives in Maine somewhere and still gets occasional phone calls and mail about the incident.


Sep 19, 2012

What happened on or around December 21, 2012?

An archeologist - in a sudden flash of insight - will flip over a stone mayan calendar and find 6,000 more years on the other side.

"My bad."


Sep 20, 2012

Will Germany start another war in Europe? Why or why not?

No.

Let's do a flyover of Germany in 1945 :

City of Kleve :


Nuremberg :


Wesel : (entirely flattened.)


Dresden :


Berlin. That Soviet Flag didn't come down for 50 years.


You get the idea. Toward the end of the war Allied bombers complained there weren't any targets left to bomb.

Number of German fatalities, about 6 million, or 8% of their entire population.

Now, nearby most german cities is a war monument which is simply a pile of rubble, to remind future generations of the ruinous results of war.

One of many, this one outside Stuttgart :


Sep 20, 2012

How does a piece of code written in JavaScript execute in a browser?

You can check out the WebKit code yourself if you want. http://www.webkit.org.

It's complicated. You've got a JavaScript engine interacting with the DOM tree and user events ...


Sep 20, 2012

Why did love in homosexual organisms go on to be naturally selected?

I don't have the source handy, but there is evidence that unusually fertile heterosexuals are more likely to have gay siblings of the opposite sex.

Combine this with the availability of (often childless) gay siblings to assist in child-rearing, and you have evolutionary pressure to produce gay people.


Sep 20, 2012

What is the best way to render HTML to a bitmap?

Go to webkit.org and pose this question. In its regression testing, webkit has tools to dump to a pix map (for automated render-checks)


Sep 21, 2012

Is Quora a challenge to Wikipedia?

There's no need to kill Wikipedia - it's already dead. Insert fork.

Not in terms of content of course, there's lots of a huge pile of useful information there.

But in terms of author engagement - people writing new content on timely or controversial topics - Wikipedia died years ago. A core group of 500 or so quite hostile and obstructionist editors do most of the editing, and drive off new volunteers.

So take a snapshot of their content. But you've really got to be nuts to waste your time trying to contribute.

Disclaimer : I haven't logged into Wikipedia in a couple of years and it's possible they have since gotten their act together.


Sep 24, 2012

Why didn't we humans develop immunity to mosquitoes if they have been around and biting us for millions of years?

1) mosquitoes have shorter life-spans (and higher population density), so can evolve faster.

2) Our response to a bite - a very annoying (but innocuous) itch - motivates us to avoid and kill mosquitoes. We are uniquely able to kill a mosquito just as it begins to bite. This helps protect us from mosquitoe-born illness. Seems evolution is doing a pretty good job.


Sep 24, 2012

Why can't Indians hold rational discussions to address issues without using elitism, social-proof, credentialism and multiple logical fallacies?

I have known and worked closely with dozens of Indian people both in the US and India and have actually noticed quite the opposite tendency.

They tend to be objective, thoughtful, and quick to yield in the face of facts.

I don't know what you're talking about.


Sep 24, 2012

What are the most important logical fallacies to be aware of?

A common one which I'm not sure has a proper name :

The cause does not negate the effect.

A lot of times people explain something, and seem to expect the explanation makes the situation evaporate.

"Dude! You stole my car!"
"Yea, I needed to get to Portland."
"Yea, but dude - you stole my car!"

"I'm stranded in 4 feet of snow!"
"Yes - a blizzard came in last night and will continue for 3 more hours."
"Okay ... and I'm stranded in four feet of snow!"


Sep 24, 2012

How do Jews signal to one another that they are members of the tribe?

Sometimes, a bit of Yiddish might be used out of curiosity to see if somebody responds in kind.

But really, Jews don't go around signaling each other.


Sep 25, 2012

Decision Making: What is the psychology behind people suddenly being so cheap when buying apps?

Most e-services are free : google, Facebook, quora, twitter, etc.

So there's that. Also, lots of apps are total crap, so people are leery if they can't try before they buy ....


Sep 25, 2012

Who would win in a war between India and China? Why?

Pakistan.


Sep 25, 2012

China in 2012: If China were to mount a non-nuclear (conventional) war against the USA, who will win?

The US would smash them within days (assuming no nukes).

The US can project air power to China on its eleven, state of the art nuclear air craft carriers.

China has one old soviet diesel carrier.

No contest.


Sep 25, 2012

Should I tell my parents that I smoke so they can help guilt me into quitting?

They almost certainly already know.

They may be able to help you quit. Honesty never hurts.


Sep 26, 2012

How do engineers converse with designers?

I don't see the two as belonging to different tribes. A lot of devs do design, and a lot of designers code.

The most dynamic startups I've seen work as a huddle, and you can't really tell the UX people from the Devs.

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A Heinlein


Sep 26, 2012

What are the best brands of electronic cigarettes?

Edit : completely revamping my answer after a year experience trying everything.

1) Forget all cigarette-sized contraptions available at convenience stores and mall kiosks. They are expensive, fragile, and don't deliver good vapor.

2) A good starter e-cig, which is fool-proof to operate and inexpensive is this the Smoktek Dual Mega-Coil Cartomizer. You can pick a complete kit online for $50 from any number of stores.


3) If you want maximum vapor production and indestructible build quality, I personally use this bad boy: It's a Provari power supply attached to a Vivi Nova Mini Tank. This costs about $180 and is for the truly dedicated vaper.


There are lots of people who post youtube reviews of various setups. The most popular is Pete Busardo. He's very informative (and often quite funny.)

PBusardo's Vaping Reviews

If you're curious about any product, do a youtube search on the product name and 'pbusardo' and he's probably posted a review of it.

As for the 'juice' (nicotine and flavoring you add to any setup), that's just too much a matter of personal preference for me to make any recommendations. However, do make sure that it contains USP food-grade propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin. You don't want to be inhaling stuff that's been sloshing inside a rusty bucket for 6 months. Avoid products from China as their regulatory practices are unreliable.

Good luck getting off tobacco! (If you don't smoke - don't touch these products!)


Sep 26, 2012

What do people think of Waze?

Tried this out last week, it brilliantly got me around a nasty traffic jam coming down the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

The ability to click on other users and see their speed was key to getting around traffic. And the social-gaming features were quite useful and fun (I was a passenger, so messaging was not a problem.)

Single most important app on my iphone.

Also loved the mobile coupon feature; hopefully more retailers will get on board with this.


Sep 26, 2012

Is it okay to steal money if I am almost sure I won't get caught? Why or why not? If this is immoral, how do you define “immoral,” and why shouldn’t people do immoral things?

When you're sure you won't get caught, that's the real test of your ethics and morality.

No other person knows, but it affects "your relation to yourself, which is the most important human relation." (quoting my dad.)

That is, you define yourself to yourself as a thief.


Sep 27, 2012

What are some of the mind blowing operations of Mossad?

It's not clear where Mossad left off and IDF picked up, but Mossad was at least heavily involved in the incredibly bad-ass Entebbe Rescue :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Entebbe

A passenger plane full of Israelis is hijacked and landed in Entebbe, Uganda. Mossad/IDF Special Forces sneak into Uganda aboard a transport plane. They are dressed as Ugandan soldiers. One of them is made to look like the president of Uganda, Idi Amin. They have a perfect replica of Amin's motorcade.

They approach the airport and the hijackers think it's Amin himself. The limos are actually packed to the roof with soldiers ready to strike with machine guns and silencers.

They storm the airport, kill every hijacker and 45 Ugandan soldiers, grab the hostages, and fly out before the Amin regime knows what the hell is going on. Oh - and they blow up 11 of Amin's jets.

This was the last time a plane full of Israelis was hijacked.

Made into a movie. Starring Charles Bronson : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076594/

Youtube video re-enacting how the rescue went down:


Sep 28, 2012

Could someone explain Nikola Tesla's lasting influence in our lives?

Tesla's polyphase generator lit up the world.

Edison's DC system couldn't be scaled. You had to be fairly close to a DC generator, and not draw too much power.

Tesla's system could generate power at Niagra falls and transmit it to New York City - even huge power sinks like a subway.

He's the father of an electric century.


Sep 30, 2012

What are the best-kept secrets about Quora?

I will give credits to any newbie who asks, if I have them.

I will also give credits to non newbies so long as their purpose isn't totally psychotic or self-serving.


Sep 30, 2012

How can a person explain what the Internet is to a kindergarten class?

You don't. It's meaningless. It's already implicit in their world (the developed world anyway).

Their first news article will probably be digitally transmitted. Their first favorite song certainly will.

The word 'Internet' is an historical artifact used to describe a transition from mechanical (paper, ink, vinyl) media to digital media.

Mechanical media attached permanently to an object, had to be physically carried, was hard to copy and immensely difficult to broadcast/distribute.

Digital media is weightless, transmittable effortlessly, copyable and a breeze to broadcast. It's globally catalogued and retrievable; it never degrades.

It's all they know and all they will ever know. The word 'Internet' is really a history lesson :

"Not long ago, all this was on paper. To send somebody a note you wrote it on paper and paid a guy to carry it the whole way. Then we build paperless machines called computers. We only called them that because they were first used to do math. Then we connected them all together, and called that the Internet. No more paper."

Like the word Freedom, it doesn't mean anything to those who have it. Rather, it points back to a time when they didn't.


Oct 1, 2012

Why do people believe in doomsday theory after doomsday theory?

It's an archetype rooted, perhaps, in our individual mortality.

Somehow it doesn't seem right that the human race should live on without us.


Oct 1, 2012

Why does a girl kiss her boyfriend right in front of me after I've exchanged "the look" with her?

Read Dan
Holiday's answer, memorize it, print it out, laminate it, and glue it to the back of your smart phone.

Tl;dr : You're misinterpreting her expression. She detects your interest and is shutting you down.


Oct 1, 2012

From a purely evolutionary perspective, what is the purpose of human life?

To create more human life.


Oct 1, 2012

Would you rather get hit over the head with a giant dildo, a shovel, or a glass bottle?

Do I really have to choose?


Oct 2, 2012

What are the pros and cons of decoupling health insurance from employers in the U.S.?

Pro: Employer-based insurance puts foreign companies at an unfair market advantage.

Placing any expense directly on employers is essentially a domestic tariff. Domestically produced goods now cost more to bring to market than their foreign counterparts.

Con : It's hard politically because it raises taxes.


Oct 2, 2012

Are electronic cigarettes safer relative to tobacco cigarettes?

A study by the Boston University School of Public Health states that e-cigarettes are much, much safer than traditional cigarettes (which does not imply they are safe.)

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-evidence-e-cigs-safer-cigarettes.html

"Few, if any, chemicals at levels detected in electronic cigarettes raise serious health concerns," the authors said. "Although the existing research does not warrant a conclusion that electronic cigarettes are safe in absolute terms and further clinical studies are needed to comprehensively assess the safety of electronic cigarettes, a preponderance of the available evidence shows them to be much safer than tobacco cigarettes and comparable in toxicity to conventional nicotine replacement products."

The report reviewed 16 laboratory studies that identified the components in electronic cigarette liquid and vapor. The authors found that carcinogen levels in electronic cigarettes are up to 1,000 times lower than in tobacco cigarettes. "The FDA and major anti-smoking groups keep saying that we don't know anything about what is in electronic cigarettes," Siegel said. "The truth is, we know a lot more about what is in electronic cigarettes than regular cigarettes." --


Oct 2, 2012

What is the best way to ask for an intro to an investor?

Directly.


Oct 3, 2012

Have television sitcoms been deliberately "dumbed down" over the years?

Not at all.

I grew up on TV during the 70's and 80's, stopped watching in the late 90's, and now just watch a few shows on demand.

Sitcoms have always been really, really stupid with a few gems breaking through.

Sitcoms like Three's Company, The Love Boat, etc. were formulaic garbage. It didn't take long for the viewer to get the formula : An artificial conflict is created, which limps along its dramatic arc while unfunny one-liners (often sexual innuendo) are exchanged. A laugh track was needed because a live audience just wouldn't laugh at this stuff.

And then there are the outliers - edgy, smart, and funny. The characters had depth, the subjects were controversial, the banter was witty : M*A*S*H, All In The Family, Seinfeld.

Nothing has changed as far as I can see. The crap-generator in LA keeps running, as it's done for decades, and is periodically challenged by a really quality show.

It's these good shows which we tend to remember.

It should also be noted that good shows tend to wind down. The writers run out of things to do with these characters and circumstances. This leads to the phenomenon called Jumping The Shark, in reference to a Happy Days episode where a character - not prone to stunts - gets on water skis and jumps a shark tank. The characters have never even been seen at a beach before, it was a complete non sequitur. The writers just ran out of ideas. "Jumping The Shark" has come to mean any series that has exhausted its premise and desperately thrashes off to new locations and out-of-character scenarios.

So between selective memory and the tendency of series to Jump The Shark, we can get the illusion that TV is getting dumber.

It was always dumb, with a few sparkling exceptions.


Oct 3, 2012

Why are corporate taxes considered less efficient than consumption or income taxes?

Unlike sales or income tax, corporate taxes encourage imports of foreign goods and investment in foreign companies.

Dollars jump the border to avoid the tax.


Oct 4, 2012

Who was more effective in the October 3rd, 2012 presidential debate? Who won the debate? Who got their points across better?

All the early analytics point to a Romney victory.

Me? I don't get it. Romney seemed to be incoherently firing off talking points and changing the subject, often twice in his responses.


Oct 4, 2012

Who decides the right and wrong? The majority? Or our inner self?

"It has yet to be demonstrated that the majority was right about anything, ever." -- anon


Oct 4, 2012

Why are Quorans so persuasive and aggressive to prove that homeopathy does not work?

Quorans are passionate about Truth.

They aren't going to give a counter-scientific assertion a pass just to be polite.


Oct 5, 2012

What are the worst lyrics in a hit song of any genre that was popular in the 20th or 21st centuries?

I've got to go with Blinded by the Light, originally by Bruce Springsteen but made into a number one hit by Manfred Man. I picked this one because a) the song is actually iconically awesome and b) the lyrics make no bleeping sense whatever. It's like Springsteen was trying out a Bob Dylan thing and had a seizure.

Madman drummers bummers,
Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat
With a boulder on my shoulder, feelin' kinda older,
I tripped the merry-go-round
With this very unpleasin', sneezin' and wheezin,
the calliope crashed to the ground
The calliope crashed to the ground

Great song. Whatever the hell it means.


Oct 5, 2012

Was Goldman Sachs responsible for the 2008 crisis? If yes, then how so?

Goldman Sachs bears a lot of the blame, sure. But there were a lot of accomplices in this disaster.

Starting with Clinton and W, there was a whole lot of banking deregulation.

Then some clever person (who?) invented new investment instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps. These allowed traders to steer around all sorts of banking regulations.

Then mortgage lenders began to lend money to any carbon-based life form who could hold a pen. Bank of America bears much of the blame here, but it was pretty pervasive in the banking industry. This was the sub prime lending fiasco.

American home-buyers went on a spending spree and got themselves into mortgages they couldn't afford.

These mortgages were wrapped up into the weird new derivative thingies.

Ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P prettied up the derivatives by giving them A+ ratings.

Brokers like Sachs sold the derivatives, even while betting against them.

It's hard to find people who weren't responsible in some way or other. A truly American fiasco.


Oct 17, 2012

What records are unlikely to be broken, ever?

Burt Munro's speed record for motorcycles under 1000 cc, set in 1967 at the Bonneville salt flats is unlikely to ever be broken.

An amazing tale : Munro was 67 at the time and his motorbike was 40 years old. It was heavily modified to get the engine size up and the weight down. Much of it was hand-made; it lacked safety features like a parachute or decent brakes.

Munro took out a mortgage on his small house, sailed all the way from New Zealand, struggled with a heart condition,.

When his rusted, ancient motorcycle broke the world speed record of 200 MPH, he became an instant legend.

That category of motorcycles under 1000cc has been permanently "frozen" to honor Munro.

It's an extremely dangerous record to attempt to break in any case. A 1000cc is a light bike, and the body has to be made even lighter to hit that speed.

A bike that light moving at that speed is at the mercy of turbulence. You've got to be semi-suicidal.

Made into a movie. "Based on one hell of a true story."


Oct 24, 2012

Why is the Pentagon a pentagon?

To add some speculation to Arik Beremzon's more authoritative answer, the pentagon shape may also be more difficult to bomb from the air.

The center is empty, so a bulls-eye hit misses entirely. The irregular shape may be confusing to bombers, and the flat structure has lots of reinforced walls so bomb damage would be more contained than in a taller structure.


Oct 25, 2012

Is the electronic cigarette effective for quitting smoking? Do electronic cigarettes have a higher success rate than other smoking cessation device/products?

I'm going to swim upstream a bit and say :

Yes. E-cigs are a safe and effective nicotine replacement therapy to help quit smoking tobacco.

All the hemming and hawing from e-cig companies is a legalistic issue, nothing else.
In the USA, a smoking cessation product has to go through FDA approval, which e-cigs have not done. So suppliers can't call it a smoking cessation product. Else they get a warning like this :

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/ucm225206.htm

This legal requirement doesn't change the fact that e-cigs are a nicotine replacement, like nicotine gum, lozenges and patches. While there are no hard numbers I'm aware of, people are quitting smoking in droves by switching to them.

Whether the FDA likes it or not :)


Oct 26, 2012

Electronic Cigarettes and Vaping: On an ego-t with a 1000 battery which stardust resistance will you advise? 2.5 ohms or low resistant like 2.2 or 1.8 ohms?

Yes, lower resistance atomizers will convert more power to heat. (amps = volts/ohms).

Some folks opt for a variable voltage battery, so that u can fine-tune the power.


Oct 27, 2012

Where is the best pizza in Salem, Massachusetts?

The newly opened Flying Saucer Pizza Company is awesome and not too pricey. Near the Samantha statue, beer on tap, campy sci fi theme, organic ingredients.

They have a unique crust recipe that includes a dash of assiago cheese.


Oct 28, 2012

Is Donald Trump correct that President Barack Obama was not academically qualified for admission to an Ivy League school without affirmative action?

Once enrolled into Harvard Law, Obama was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review by his peers.

This would indicate he wasn't just acceptable, he was exceptional.


Oct 30, 2012

How might a brilliant middle-class teenager become the richest person on Earth within 20 years?

First, the hero spots a completely new demand, like microcomputers. This could come about through a cultural shift, an enabling new technology (like microchips or locomotives), or a crisis (e.g. Food or fuel shortage).

Second, the hero finds a nearly inexhaustible supply for that demand. (like software or railroads.)

Third, he finds a way to monopolize that demand. A deep moat competitors can't cross.

(I'll try to come back with an example ...)


Oct 31, 2012

Will the world end in 2012, as per the Mayan prophecy?

I will wager 10,000 that it won't.


Oct 31, 2012

Who are/were some of the most badass computer programmers?

This distinction probably goes to Bill Gates who (with Paul Allen) wrote a Basic Interpreter for the Altair in 1975.

It fit into a mind-blowing 4K of memory.
An entire language, plus floating point arithmetic, in 4K of machine code.

An industry is born. Did I mention Gates didn't HAVE an Altair to test on? (He used an emulator).

Ed Roberts, president of the company that made Altair (MITS), detested Gates. Roberts took out a national magazine ad offering a bounty to anyone else who duplicate the feat.

Nobody could.

The paper tape has been on display at various museums :


Nov 1, 2012

What are the best examples of people who have "gamed the system"?

In the old days of land-lines, there was this thing called a "Collect Call." For you digital natives : you'd have an operator call somebody for you and ask them to put the call on their bill. You'd tell the operator who you are and s/he would ask,
"John Doe from Dallas would like to make a collect call. Do you accept the charges?"

Here's the hack : you can encode a message into the name.

You and the receiver set this up in advance.

For example : "Joe Logan" can mean "I'm at Logan airport - come pick me up." The receiver refuses the call, message is sent.


Nov 1, 2012

Are evolution and an increase in intelligence interconnected?

Wow - this is a good question.

It's possible that unstable climate is a prerequisite for intelligent life.

The earth is unusual in that it got hit by something enormous early in its life, knocking its axis off-center and causing that axis to slowly wobble. This has created periodic ice ages.

Intelligent life has a special advantage during periods of climate change. Rather than doing what it's always done, it can figure out new ways to live : Wrapping itself in furs of other creatures, discovering fire, inventing hunting weapons, etc.

It's survival of the smartest when the glaciers come.


Nov 3, 2012

How many people are interested in a monthly meetup in the Boston area?

I work in Denver during the week and live in Cambridge/Salem on weekends. Is there any chance we could do this on a weekend? I'd like to come.


Nov 5, 2012

When looking for Venture Capitalists how do you quantify a Social Networking idea?

VC's won't fund an idea, but rather a working site (however crude).

The only numbers they will care about is number of users and rate of growth.


Nov 6, 2012

Why are most political elections in the modern world not decided by popular vote?

In the US (and I suspect elsewhere), this was necessary in order to stitch together a nation out of little pieces.

A state with few people, say Wyoming (population 450,000), would feel obliterated in a simple head-count. They would only have .015% of the vote.

In the electoral vote scheme, a state can have no less than 2 electoral votes. This means that any state, no matter how small, is guaranteed at least 0.4% of the voting power.

Put differently, it is a concession to the sovereignty of each state regardless of its population.

It was an incentive to yield power to a central government.


Nov 6, 2012

Chess: What made Garry Kasparov so great?

You don't need to be a chess master, or even very good at chess to appreciate his genius (you can watch his games replayed on YouTube and in a java app)

Kasparov would make massive material sacrifices to gain strategic advantage. Throw away his queen and both bishops and go on to win the game.

It really freaked out his opponents.


Nov 6, 2012

What are the best lawyer jokes?

Why don't sharks bite lawyers?

Professional courtesy.


Nov 6, 2012

What is so great about Apple?

Apple shipped a new product when Jobs loved it.

Period. They did not treat customers as some alien species to be studied, figured out, manipulated. They didn't think of customers at all.

Amazingly, they won the game because they refused to play.

Jobs would halt a product launch, incur enormous financial loss to ship only things that he loved. And he had very good taste.

There is a deep humility in this. "When I personally find it amazing, only then is it good enough for you."


Nov 7, 2012

What evidence exists to support the claim that the United States intervened in the Middle East solely for oil?

There was a think tank called Project For A New American Century, of which Cheney, Wolfowitz and others were members.

They produced white papers insisting on the need to secure the oil fields in the middle east, especially iraq, via military intervention.

I'll try to hunt down original sources, as there is a lot of leftist hysteria about this on the web.


Nov 8, 2012

Why are people so quick to dismiss the tactless and ignorant as trolls unworthy of a straight answer?

"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.". - Benjamin Franklin


Nov 8, 2012

How do experienced programmers add features to other people's open-source program? Where do they start? How would they begin to get a feel for the code and understand what parts of the code do what?

I remember the first time I had to do this. I had always written my own code from scratch and, on my first day work work for the DoD, was faced with a huge wall of inscrutable code.

What I found was this: It's a lot like moving into a new city.

Be a tourist. Just walk around, pop into shops, get lost. You're going to feel confused for a while. That's OK.

That lost sensation is your brain desperately collecting and connecting information.

Be a tourist in the code base. Just jump around like crazy. It helps to use an IDE so that you can pop into a class declaration and such.

This town is going to have its own style. They will have a favorite sport and food. They will talk a certain way.

Give it time. Nothing is going to make much sense at first. There will be things you don't like.

You will find enormous structures like shopping malls that serve many purposes. You'll also discover little hot dog stands that are just convenient.

Have fun and enjoy the lost feeling. Don't take notes or pictures or anything. Keep your senses open to everything around you.

OK, so now you spent some time getting lost. You've got a feel for some things, how they talk in this city, that some places are easy to get to and some are really easy to get lost in.

Now get out your camera. A camera has this miraculous ability to freeze a moment in time.

By camera I mean debugger. Run the code and set breakpoints. Look at the call stack and the variables. What you learn from your first snapshots will inform your choice of what to snap next.

Next, find a native who shares your interest and follow them around. That is, go back through the changelog and see how others before you added a feature.

Finally, be bold and take a native out on the town. That is, attempt to add a feature and submit the patch. The native (reviewer) is going to make you feel pretty silly, "Wow - you could have taken the 455 bus and saved an hour here." That's OK. Appreciate and internalize their feedback.

You'll be giving tours to your friends in no time.

(Apologies for stretching the new-city metaphor a bit far!)


Nov 8, 2012

What are the Obama girls really like?

Nobody knows.

That's by design.

There is a time-honored tradition in the USA that the children of the president are off-limits in any public forum. No pictures not posed-for-with-the-prez, no speculation, no gossip.

They didn't run for anything. By an accident of history they are known world-wide.

It's hard enough growing up with a team of secret service in tow and a helicopter over-head.

Let our curiosity give way to decency.

EDIT (12/01/2014). Every now and then somebody forgets this and loses their job. Even at a public photo-op with the president, criticism of the children isn't tolerated :

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/01/politics/gop-staffer-resigns-over-criticism-of-obama-daughters/?hpt=hp_t2


Nov 9, 2012

Would you prefer a Windows 8 smartphone over an Android smartphone? Why?

Not yet.

I think Windows 8 out of the box has the best UI anywhere. Reviewers tend to agree.

There's a problem with the apps, though. Not in the total number of them, but in the quality of the 30 or so most commonly used. See Dear Windows Phone: Get Your Shit Together.

As a software developer I have no interest in learning Windows development due to their 3-ish% marketshare, closed-source bloated development environment, and general dickishness over the last few decades. I would buy a personal device I also want to develop on (* <- probably important point, MS ).

Finally Android has many more hardware options to choose from.


Nov 10, 2012

What is a good question regarding the United Kingdom which are rarely (if ever) asked?

That huge diamond in the Queen's crown ... Where'd ya get that?


Nov 10, 2012

What was where you live like 150 years ago?

My beloved town of Salem, Massachusetts was pretty awesome :

By 1862 Salem had become wealthy as a bustling port north of Boston. The import business was falling off, and Salem with its 12,000 or so residents busied themselves with land-based commerce:

A century of shipping had instilled its residents with a special curiosity about the world, love of culture, and a cosmopolitan sensibility quite unusual for such a small town. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived here and wrote House of the Seven Gables. The house still stands :


Fiercely abolitionist, many people here had been involved in hiding, sheltering, and smuggling escaped slaves. Slaves were snuck to safety in Canada aboard ships that slipped out during the night. All of this was in defiance of the Federal Fugutive Slave Act of 1850.

Salem was home to about 300 "free blacks" (a good many escaped slaves also stayed here to assist in the Underground Railground.) The most notable of these was Sarah Parker Redmond, whose eloquent speeches and writings were known throughout American and Europe :

A great many church groups - especially Quakers but others as well - were active in the Underground Railroad. Slaves were hidden in church basements and in people's houses.

And, in 1862, there weren't many able-bodied men around. They were dying by the hundreds in a Civil War that finally put a stop to human slavery in America.

Yea, I love this place.


Nov 10, 2012

What are the long-term health effects of having 1–2 alcoholic drinks most days?

Your risk of heart attack and stroke drops by half.

Half.

Alcohol May Reduce Men's Heart Risk


Nov 11, 2012

Why is Richard Dawkins so hated by some people?

I'm an evolutionist. I've watched a lot of Dawkin's talks and interviews,

The guy is just nasty. He gets ugly while the creationists keep their cool. He doesn't inform, he hates.

I'm in total agreement with him but I don't want him within shouting distance.


Nov 12, 2012

Is there a possibility that ecigarettes are worse than regular cigarettes?

There is virtually no possibility, so long as you stick to "smoke juice" which publishes its ingredients ( like Johnson Creek, Vapor Bomb and many others.) Burning tobacco releases hundreds of compounds, many of which are carcinogenic.
It also creates carbon monoxide, which damages your heart.

E-cigs release nothing but nicotine, water vapor, propylene glycol (a food additive) or vegetable glycerin.

From the Boston University School of Public Health :

Evidence Suggests E-Cigs Safer Than Cigarettes, Researcher Claims

"Few, if any, chemicals at levels detected in electronic cigarettes raise serious health concerns," the authors said. "Although the existing research does not warrant a conclusion that electronic cigarettes are safe in absolute terms and further clinical studies are needed to comprehensively assess the safety of electronic cigarettes, a preponderance of the available evidence shows them to be much safer than tobacco cigarettes and comparable in toxicity to conventional nicotine replacement products."


The report reviewed 16 laboratory studies that identified the components in electronic cigarette liquid and vapor. The authors found that carcinogen levels in electronic cigarettes are up to 1,000 times lower than in tobacco cigarettes.

"The FDA and major anti-smoking groups keep saying that we don't know anything about what is in electronic cigarettes," Siegel said. "The truth is, we know a lot more about what is in electronic cigarettes than regular cigarettes."

Nov 12, 2012

Is Obama the first president to smoke cigarettes while in office?

Johnson struggled to get off cigarettes during his presidency :


Reagan didn't smoke during his presidency but he sold cigarettes :


And Clinton's cigar, well ... less said the better.


Nov 13, 2012

How can you define yourselves in three words?

Happy to be.


Nov 13, 2012

Has anyone benefited tangibly from answering on Quora, and if so by what terms were these benefits?

Quora got me to write.

My family and friends were always on my case to write. Especially my Dad who passed away too young, a long time ago.

It's had some professional advantages, which would probably more directly qualify as 'visible'.

But as Antoine St Exupery said, "What is essential is invisible to the eye."

I was humbled by Top Writer status and, if there is an Elysium, my Dad is there smiling.


Nov 13, 2012

What is your craziest ambition?

To plug in a USB cable on the first attempt JUST ONE FUCKING TIME.


Nov 14, 2012

What common phrases are derived from obsolete technologies?

"Car" is an abbreviation of "Carriage".


Nov 14, 2012

Is arguing with atheists a futile effort and a waste of time?

EDIT : rewritten 12/22/14

This answer is going to make some smart people mad. People whom I admire and are 'Power users' on the site.

Here's my experience : On Quora, between atheists, believers, and agnostics - atheists are BY FAR the most fanatical, narrow-minded and repetitive.

Now, I'm not religious. Raised a Christian from Jewish lineage, I claim no doctrine.

In other words, I really don't care. Which perhaps lends some credibility to my view.

A couple considerations first -.

The atheists seem mad at the Anerican religious right. And rightly so. But nothing to do with atheism. We have the separation of church and state, generally expanded to the principle that no religious statement is relevant to political discourse. So - go fight the religious right wing, not their whole religion. An ancient African expression warns, "Do not hunt what you cannot kill."

Atheists are on the most difficult to defend philosophical ground. Believers say they have faith, not knowledge. Nothing really to argue there. Agnostics just shrug and don't know. Can't argue with them either. But atheists claim KNOWLEDGE of a negative proposition : that there is no intent/creator/designer and they are 100% positive of the non existence of this thing.


They know. In all my life, nobody
has told me how they came to know this.

I can't imagine why an atheist wouldn't just move on. I don't believe in Astrology. I think I have spent 20 seconds during my life on that belief.

I don't spend time on non entities, even if others do.

I'd like to see the atheists Be Nice and Respectful to divergent views. Not to try to win converts.

It's a very strange inversion. The religious folk - Christian/Jewish/Muslim that I've read here seem calmer and more reasonable and inclusive.

The atheists are shrill fanatics. Irony of .... Biblical proportions.

*apologies to the individual atheist writers - many of whom are excellent. Also, this all mostly my personal response to what I've seen on Quora.

Ok - I'm about to get flamed anyway. Have at it, I always give flamers the last word.


Nov 15, 2012

What should everyone know about Quora?

It's like Harvard with a heart.


Nov 15, 2012

Is Mitt Romney's analysis of why he lost the presidential election to President Obama correct? If not, why did he lose the election to President Obama?

It's illogical on the face of it. You could be from Neptune and still see it's invalid.

Romney's says Obama gave out benefits like health care to "targeted groups" : women, those without health insurance, etc means simply that :

So he's saying Obama helped some people.

Enough to vote him back in.

Romney says this group is "small" (targeted) when they benefit, but "big" when they vote.

It's nonsense.


Nov 15, 2012

What are some funny gay jokes or anecdotes?

"I'm not gay but my boyfriend is."

I used that line when I, as a str8 man would go hang out a lot with my gay male friend, go out to dinner, on trips etc.

Origin unknown.


Nov 15, 2012

Would smoking be significantly less harmful if you were to organically grow and harvest your own tobacco?

No.

Tobacco, in its natural form, is in fact pretty innocuous. Swedish snus, which is taken orally, has almost negligible negative effects (pancreatic cancer results in 3/10,000 ppl).

The problem is no matter how organically you grow the stuff, you then do something very inorganic : set it on fire and inhale the smoke.

The heat breaks up and recombines molecules into all sorts of things your body can't handle. Carcinogens, especially Nitrosamines.

Typical chewing tobacco is fire-cured, which also heats it above 150 F or so (unlike Swedish snus).

So ... Grow it organically, rip it out of the ground and chew it. You should be fine.

EDIT : I should probably not encourage the use of any nicotine containing product except to quit smoking.

The question of Snus' safety seems worth more attention, I updated and promoted :


Nov 15, 2012

What are some funny jokes about the difference between men and women?

A joke and a true story from my life. I am in a car with my girlfriend and my guy friend. They just came out with those thingies that let you pay tolls via RFID thingies stuck to your windshield.

Guy friend : "What's that thing?"
Girlfriend : "Oh, well you order one of those from the State, and then connect it to your checking account -"
Me (interrupting) : "Pays tolls."


Nov 16, 2012

Why do a hammer and a feather dropped from a height land at the same time? Assuming that the mass of the hammer and feather are different, and by Newton's law of F= G m1m2 /r^2, should the earth exert more force on the heavier object?

The earth does pull harder on the hammer. But the hammer is harder to accelerate in equal measure.


Nov 16, 2012

What are your favourite last words?

"Hey y'all! Watch this here!"


Nov 17, 2012

What makes a great conversation?

Taking turns.

Don't dominate the topic, don't change it. Rather ... Riff ... Off each other.

Kinda like sex in words.


Nov 19, 2012

What are the most basic mathematical proofs or facts that the majority of people would benefit from?

The Prisoner's Dilemma, from game theory.

This is a simple but mind-blowing mathematical proof that sometimes people must act against their self interest to most benefit their self-interest. This is an antidote to Rand's "Objectivism."

"Two men are arrested, but the police do not have enough information for a conviction. The police separate the two men, and offer both the same deal: if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates with/assists his partner), the betrayer goes free and the one that remains silent gets a one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail on a minor charge. If each 'rats out' the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept secret from his partner. What should they do? If it is assumed that each player is only concerned with lessening his own time in jail, the game becomes a non-zero sum game where the two players may either assist or betray the other. The sole concern of the prisoners seems to be increasing his own reward. The interesting symmetry of this problem is that the optimal decision for each is to betray the other, even though they would be better off if they both cooperated."

Prisoner's dilemma


Nov 21, 2012

What are some of mankind's stupidest concepts?

That 30 people learn best by sitting silently for 50 minutes while someone talks at them.


Nov 21, 2012

Why is Mark Zuckerberg not on Quora but Adam D'Angelo is on Facebook?

He's probably not active here for the same reason CEO's of other big public companies take care to minimize and manage their communications.

One slip of the tongue could tank their stock, get them sued, or tip their strategy.


Nov 21, 2012

What is a good tagline for Quora?

We've got the answer.


Nov 22, 2012

Whatever happened to RFID?

It's now called NFC (
Near Field Communications). It will soon enable your smartphone to act as a digital wallet. Stay tuned ...


Nov 22, 2012

What should every programmer (in general) know about Android development?

The emulator is very slow.

Develop directly on the device.

If you don't have a device, get a native intel port of the android image and run it in a virtual machine.


Nov 22, 2012

What must be done to effectively integrate Scrum or any Agile methodology in a waterfall culture?

I trust you're asking how to migrate from waterfall to agile (from your Question Details).

The thing is this : forget scrum, JIRA, backlogs, sprints and all the tools and terms that sprout from Agile.

Agile is nothing less than a revolt against waterfall. It is hostile to a top-down command structure. It's a coup which declares :

The people doing the work should make their own decisions. The coders, testers, UI people and so forth should work shoulder to shoulder, set the schedule, design the product, woo the client (if any), write the docs (if any).

If you're not doing actual stuff, there's no place for you. It is nobody's job to "make sure other people do theirs.". Planning and design are not separate roles, they are an integral part of the teams activity.

Big corporations - almost by definition - are top-down command structures in which the people with the most authority do the least actual work.

For them, Agile is suicide.

Big companies usually adapt Agile's terms and tools but stick to their waterfall ways. The typical tag line is, "We've adapted Agile to fit with BigCo's culture!"

Bullshit.

The only effective approach I've seen is this : spin off small teams. Give them all the information and contacts they need. So they run essentially as an autonomous startup.

This is a bit easier for consultancies, who deal in lots of little projects.


Nov 22, 2012

How can you avoid getting distracted frequently when working?

This really works for me :

I do only work on my desktop. Facebook, Quora, etc I do on my phone, next to my workstation.

The increased friction of mobile keeps my interactions short, and forms a sharp distinction between work and goofing off.


Nov 24, 2012

Why do I get so hungover?

You may be one of those people whose liver doesn't process alcohol well. It has to do with this stuff called acetaldehyde.

In most people, alcohol hits the liver and an oxygen atom gets pulled off to make acetaldehyde. Then another oxygen atom quickly comes off to make acetate (vinegar), which is expelled in your pee.

Certain people have livers that don't do that second step quickly enough. So acetaldehyde builds up.

The results are unpleasant and come quickly. Headache, flushing of the skin,dizziness, rapid heart beat are common.

This is how antabuse (disulfiram) works. This is a drug given to alcoholics. It blocks completely the breakdown of acetaldehyde. One drink and the person feels very sick.

Certain ethnic groups have been claimed to have a genetic predisposition to this metabolic deficiency. The tendency of people from East Asia to flush red in the face had been called the "Asian Flush".

This metabolic issue may contribute to alcoholism : an effective short term fix for the effects of acetaldehyde is to drink more alcohol. A vicious cycle.

It has been suggested this is the cause of the high incidence of alcoholism in Irish and Native American people.

Whether this is your issue is anybody's guess. But one thing is for sure :

If one beer makes you feel lousy, your body is telling you not to drink at all.


Nov 24, 2012

What should everyone know about love?

"it leaves ya, baby, if you don't care for it.". -- U2, the song "One"


Nov 24, 2012

What are the best flavored e-cigarettes?

To add to these suggestions, Johnson Creek Smoke Juice has a distinctive, vanilla-ish undertone that I really like.

They publish their ingredients and monitor nicotine levels via an outside auditor (possibly in preparation for negotiating for FDA approval in the USA)

Vaporbomb.com is also popular in the US.


Nov 24, 2012

Are e-cigs allowed in airports?

Nobody stopped me from smoking an ecig in either Boston or Denver.


Nov 24, 2012

What should every programmer know about statistics?

Statistics doesn't really inform programming.


Nov 24, 2012

Startups and "How Important Are Ideas?": Programmers, what do you think when you hear "I just need a tech co-founder"?

"Dude, I am totally going places. Can I have a ride? By the way I have no gas money."


Nov 28, 2012

Do you believe this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?

No.

Western civilization is an engine of growth. It pushes other cultures off whole continents, it consumes everything in its path, it breeds like crazy.

It's not evil, it's just evolution : The dominant culture is bound to be the one that grows at all costs.

Now the earth is full and we don't have much fuel left - which we need to feed almost 10 billion people.

It's time for a major cultural shift, away from growth.

We're done growing. Now it's time to endure.


Nov 28, 2012

What is your review of Lincoln (2012 movie)?

I was shocked, most of all, at what the movie was not.

No sweeping civil war scenes. No arm-chair psychoanalytic deconstruction of his childhood. No rise to power. No assassination scene.

The film avoided every biographical cliché and gave us instead a portrait so vivid and intense it almost defied belief. We are given Lincoln - frail, flawed, and conflicted. Folksy to a fault (his stories just go on and on), trying to do some good in the world through brazen corruption.

It is the most authentic rendition of a human being I have ever seen. A human being who, it seems, just happened to find himself at the crossroads of history. And the cross-hairs.


Nov 30, 2012

What has been the most transformative political event in your life?

The election of President Barack Obama.

As a white American, it was the first time I felt I could look an African American in the eye without centuries of awful history in the way.


Nov 30, 2012

What is the most powerful and profound quote?

"I asked why doesn't someone do something about it?

Then I realized I was someone.". -- anon


Dec 1, 2012

What's the most counterintuitive thing you've learned?

The key to success is how you fail.

Almost all very successful people share a similar history : They fail quickly, brilliantly, and often.

Get out there and fall on your face !


Dec 1, 2012

What is it like to randomly meet a celebrity?

I was helping a local band load their gear into a bar/restaurant called Captain Carlos in Gloucester.

I went up to the bar. The bartender turned toward me and looked like Whoopi Goldberg.

Exactly like Whoopi Goldberg.

"You're ... You're ... "

"Yep. I am. What can I get ya?"

I ordered and walked away all ... WTF? Is she researching a movie role? This Oscar winner just poured me a drink!

Turned out she was taking a break from acting, caught in that limbo age for women actors between leading lady and leading mom. She was co-owner of the bar and worked there sometimes.

Because the band loaded out after close, I got a chance to sit with her a few minutes:

Me : "Forgive me for being a little star-struck."
Her : *waves her hand "Get over it."
Me : "I saw you in the early days, a one-woman standup act, before you were famous. Loved it."
Her : "So you don't like any of my recent stuff then?"

I realized ass-kissing wouldn't fly.

Me : "Why tending bar?"
Her : "I do whatever I want these days. And that's what I want to do."

A few minutes went by and the staff started to make moves to shut down. Whoopi (Karen) said,

"I'm going to tell you something my grandmother told me, when I was young like you. Go and do whatever feels right. But realize not everybody's gonna dig it."

And she got up and returned to stocking clean glasses.

This was 2004 or so and she has since returned to being a "celebrity".

I guess people dig it again.


Dec 1, 2012

Who are some famous people whose identities are still unknown?

Carly Simon never disclosed who she's singing about (to) in You're So Vain.



Dec 2, 2012

What is the point of credit farming on Quora?

I don't really farm credits; I'm kind of a Quora "trust fund baby" with some answers that get upvoted a lot. A few are pretty old.

I don't care at all about score-keeping. You can have most of my credits, any time. Just ask.

I use them for one thing : To cheat. To promote things into people's feeds so they get read.

Usually, my own answers. Not because I think they are awesome, but rather are stuck in a dim corner of quora. Maybe there's many answers, or it's an esoteric topic.

For example, here was a little quip of mine. It's really not a brilliant answer at all. What's interesting is the huge reaction to it by Quorans - 900 upvotes so far.

Christopher Reiss's answer to What are some of mankind's stupidest concepts? : "That 30 people learn best by sitting silently for 50 minutes while someone talks at them."

I think this reaction speaks to Quora's excitement about being a massive global academy - a new type of self-directed classroom where all of us are both student and teacher. There are so many other answers on that page, I don't think anybody would have seen mine had I not "seeded" it by promoting it to 200 people. I recouped my investment in upvotes, though that wasn't my intention.

Another example is this - Christopher Reiss's answer to What is it like to randomly meet a celebrity?. This was a rather poignant moment for me, and I took some care to tell the story. But few people would have seen it given so many answers on that page.

I also use credits to promote other people's answers which are a) awesome and b) under-voted. So that more people see the good stuff (in my humble estimation.)

Finally, I'll use them to promote somebody's Question if it isn't getting answered. I'll also use Ask To Answer in that scenario.

And yea. I'm happy to give you some.


Dec 2, 2012

Why are physicians discouraged from developing interventions that could prevent or reverse homosexuality? If nobody chooses to be gay, why not develop interventions that could prevent it?

I don't know.

Given the suffering that homosexuality incurs on both its victims and society,
you'd think this would be a more active area of research.

There are always, however, a few bold physicians who need no encouragement.
The foundation for a cure to homosexuality has already been worked out by the Danish physician Carl Vaenet :


He used hormone injections in an attempt to cure homosexuality. In 1943, he announced that he had found the cure. This was probably premature of course, but hey - he was working on it.

It wasn't easy balancing his research with his duties as SS officer at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Arrested for war crimes in Copenhagen, 1945. Escaped to Brazil.

Died in hiding in Argentina in 1965.

(For the record, this response is a sarcastic expression of my contempt at the notion that homosexuality is an illness. Reductio ad-Hitlerim? You bet.)


Dec 3, 2012

What does the fact that corporate profits are at an all-time high, while worker wages are at a record low, tell us about the state of the American economy?

EDIT : (completely changing answer.)

It means the rich are about to get hit. Hard.

It is a mistake, I think, to view our times as unique : automated, globally connected, etc.

Bullshit. Not to get too Hegel/Marx on you, but this dynamic has been active since the dawn of civilization.

The builders of the Pyramids were not slaves : they were well paid, well housed and fed.

Because the pharaohs knew that miserable workers don't build god-worthy monuments.

When the disparity between poor and wealthy becomes too great, the rich lose. Whether by guillotine or communism or the nationalization of their wealth.

History is lost on many people and so it must repeat. A new FDR is in the making.

S/he will seize a large portion of the country's wealth and set new standards in law.

Don't take my word for it : google the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Or "Lenin". Or "The Terror."

The single greatest threat to wealth is a poorly paid working class.

Enduring societies understand this. Doomed ones suggest the poor eat cake.


Dec 3, 2012

What might Richard Feynman have meant when he said "Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”?

Don't put your education in the hands of others.


Dec 4, 2012

Why is automatic theorem proving such a difficult task for computers?

Because important proofs require wild imagination.

The most important work in mathematics is done by inventing a beautiful structure, out of which the theorem drops out as an apparent side-effect. The mathematician's instinct is toward elegance - the subjective perception of beauty. The theorem itself does little to point the way. The structure - once discovered - usually throws off a hundred more important theorems - and raises more important conjectures.

Work in math is not the procedural banging-out of theorems; it is an exploration of a structural and intricate landscape. Every now and then an explorer lands on a distant shore and attention shifts to a new continent.

For example, Evariste Galois tackled the problem of solving polynomials above degree 4. He created - seemingly out of thin air - an elegant tower of wheels spinning within wheels. For polynomials of degree 5, the wheels can't be made to fit inside each other and the engine breaks.

Forget solving polynomials, Galois' discovery (group theory) was a deep insight into symmetry. It is everywhere now in mathematics and physics, from crystallography to code breaking.

For another example, Godel considered whether we can ever be sure we have enough axioms in place to do number theory. His construction was so wild it would have been considered insane - had it not worked. Godel turned mathematics to look at it self, it became "self-aware" (to wax poetic.) This "introspection" created a blind-spot - a singularity which the engine could not see.

The structure collapsed.

Godel's work is often cited as both the most beautiful and most important theorem in mathematics, and opened to the door more stunning results like the Axiom of Choice and the Church-Turing thesis.

The theorems we see written down by these researchers are like the ship's logs of nautical explorers; they are the merest annotations of the most profound visions the human mind has ever glimpsed.

(David Hilbert quipped, of a student who abandoned mathematics for poetry, "That is good. Mathematics takes too much imagination for this fellow." [I paraphrase, reference needed.])

(Mathematicians will undoubtedly object to my simplifications here. I feel descriptions like these serve a purpose sometimes though, and hope this answer serves as an invitation to these topics and not a target for, um, nit picking :) )


Dec 4, 2012

What are some of the most thought-provoking and powerful quotations you've ever heard or read?

"Not all who wander are lost." -- J R R Tolkien


Dec 4, 2012

Why hasn't video taken off on the web in the way photographs have?

Time.

We scan and rebroadcast *flickers* of information.


Dec 5, 2012

How do you overcome the paralysis caused by trivial failure?

I have no psychology training, but this sounds like OCD : striving for an impossible and pointless perfection.

There are both medical and cognitive behavior remedies to this; I only offer this little insight because I was ATA'd.

Hopefully some professionals will chime in.

Promoting your question.


Dec 5, 2012

What are some good jokes about Quora?

Answer downvoted.


Dec 5, 2012

Can evolution be faster and more efficient?

Could another earth-like planet have gotten to humans faster (to give a smugly anthropocentric definition to 'efficient')?

Maybe. Some scientists think the engine of evolution was climate change.

The earth goes through periodic ice ages which challenge species to adapt. (So do mass extinctions from meteor strikes, etc., but whatever.) Humans are the most adaptable thing on earth thanks to our big brains.

It gets cold - we put the fur of other animals on our skin. Harness fire. Secure new food supplies. Wipe out other species competing for resources.

Humans existed in nearly modern form before the last ice age. As the earth cooled and food got scarce, something pretty amazing appears in the fossil record. Human shelters built from the tusks of Wooly Mammoth.

They were hunting Woolly fucking Mammoth :


Talk about bad-ass adaptation. Imagine the cooperation, communication, weapons and tactics it took to bring these things down. With sticks and stones.

Humans emerged from that long winter with technology.
On almost the first day of summer, about 10,000 years ago, they started to build: Megalithic structures, organized permanent settlements, domesticated animals and plants.

This recently discovered artifact was built around 9,000 BC, at Göbekli Tepe.

(See Brian Roemmele's answer to How does the Göbekli Tepe find change our view of human history?)

The last ice age lit the torch of civilization. Previous ice ages probably paved the way, favoring ever-smarter monkeys.

To answer your question, evolution can perhaps be sped up by destabilizing the environment in which it occurs.


Dec 5, 2012

What was the secret behind the high quality productions in film industry in 1999?

I have heard mention of the fact that there was a speculative bubble in film-making in the late nineties. Investors were dumping money into movies alongside the dot-com boom.

There was also the powerhouse of Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, bankrolled by Disney but given near complete autonomy.

In short : money.


Dec 5, 2012

If it is a myth that men are intimidated by successful and confident women, then why are so many successful, confident, and attractive women single?

"You're rich, smart and hot. Get out of my bed" -- said no man, ever.


Dec 5, 2012

It's said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. However, we now know that vacuum is permeated by fluctuating energy density gradients. So, at what point does a vacuum stop being a vacuum? How does the speed of light vary in the range of energy densities that we still refer to as a vacuum?

There is no restriction in Relativity about being *born* at speed > c. It's the acceleration that takes infinite energy.

Such theorized particles are called Tachyons (Greek for fast) and move backward in time. And mess up your head.


Dec 6, 2012

What is the best process for simplifying a user interface and experience?

In addition to Dan Saffer's great answer :

One designer only.

One person must be allowed to have a unified and cohesive vision.

It is terribly difficult for organizations to adhere to this. This is the reason so many big companies with infinite resources produce crappy designs. There must be no :

Meetings with multiple "stake-holders" so that everybody is "on the same page".

Usability testing where decisions are made by watching people try the product like lab-rats.

Feature-creep. "Oh! Make it do this here!".


The designer must be given free reign to produce an awesome design and big, heavy stick with which to tell anybody who suggests a tweak to fuck off.

I truly believe this is the reason little 4-person start-ups keep beating big organizations.

You can stop reading. This point I am fanatical about. The next point is an aside and hunch :

The designer-God should be a generalist.

The designer should be able to code. They don't have to be a Top Coder or anything, but they should not remain aloof from the spinning gears of their design.

They should be able to produce a prototype with a smattering of HTML/CSS/Javascript and maybe a bit of back-end "stab at it" sort of thing. Or some MVC framework.

There is something about feeling the clay. The oft-repeated "Architect hands blueprint to carpenter analogy" does not apply. It's closer to sculpture.

As a sculptor is working with the materials, the design changes in response to the material. It doesn't come out exactly as originally intended. The material pushes back on the design and a beautiful synthesis emerges of design and substance.


Dec 6, 2012

What happened to the America that some of us used to love? I feel like the takers are in charge. We'll never see an America I consider sensible again. Where has the America some of us knew gone? How can we get it back?

It elected the other guy.

That happens about half the time.

Fortunately, it's set up so a minority of people feel the way you do.

Your chance will come again in 2016.


Dec 6, 2012

Does peeing make you warmer or colder?

Colder.

You're venting thermal energy in your pee.


Dec 7, 2012

What is one thing that is true about the entire (or most of it) human population? Why?

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

― John F. Kennedy


Dec 7, 2012

What are some significant open source projects written by employees on company-sponsored time?

Most of Webkit, the engine beneath the Chrome and Safari browsers, was written by engineers at Apple, Google and Nokia on company time.

All three companies needed a browser for various devices (The Gecko engine - Firefox didn't meet their needs). They didn't want to be in the browser business though, so collaborated on the open-source Webkit.

I was paid to make a few modest patches myself!


Dec 7, 2012

Why does the Earth rotate, why does it rotate at the speed that it does? Why does it rotate on a stable axis rather than wobbling around?

The earth started out as a cloud, which was spinning just a little because it's more likely than being perfectly still. Just a little.

Like a figure skater with her arms outstretched.

Gravity caused the cloud particles to move toward the center to form a ball.

The figure skater draws in her arms and - whoosh! - spins like a top.


Dec 8, 2012

Should euthanasia be permitted? Why, or why not?

A right implies we are sovereign over something.

The right to free speech is also the right to be silent.
The right to vote is also the right to abstain from a vote.

And the right to live is also the right to die.


Dec 8, 2012

Is Rise of the Planet of the Apes worth seeing? Why or why not?

Yes.

First of all, it's fun. A gripping popcorn film, you can't take your eyes off of it. The time-worn archetypes of “Noble Savage” and simple revenge … work, as they always do.

Secondly, this is required viewing for film buffs – or anyone interested in the history of movie-making. Rise of the Apes marks a turning-point in special effects.

Excuse me a short diversion to take a look back.

2001 : A Space Odyssey took the viewer to space in a totally believable way.

Jurassic Park brought long-dead creatures back to life so vividly you couldn't consider them unreal.

Avatar invented a world so dazzling it felt like your eyeballs would implode.

Rise of The Apes takes its place in film history with all these.

But first one more quick aside : The original Planet of the Apes (to which Rise is technically a prequel) is hallowed ground in film-making. A young Charleton Heston gives one of three performances of his life (along with Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments) as the gritty and confused astronaut achingly lost in a strange world. The sight of apes casting hunting nets over mute humans is impossible to forget. The closing scene is one of the most famous ever.

"You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

Hallowed ground. You don't touch Planet of The Apes. You don't think about touching it. You don't reboot it, you don't remake it. You leave it the hell alone.

Unless you have something really, really new to offer. The kind of thing that comes around once a decade or so.

Rise of The Apes did just that. This is the first time in movie history that special effects carry the full emotional weight of the film.

The human actors in this movie are pretty bad. One wonders if this might have been intentional. They are hollow, vacuous – we don't attach to them. The two main actors seem borrowed from a soap opera for the movie. John Lithgow is great as the frightened and frail father with Alzheimer's, but it's a small part.

The ape (Caesar) – the computer generated ape – is not just rendered believably, he is given a soul. The camera moves in and his face lights up with a full range of emotion. We feel his wonder. We sense his yearning. We share his rage.






In this film, the apes truly do rise and herald a new age of film-making where special-effects surpass humans to take on the life of the movie.

A great movie? Nah. But a great moment in film history.


Dec 8, 2012

What are the best ways to cheat in an exam hall?

An ancient tale, whose origin has been lost, has been told for generations.

This is how one student cheated the "put your pens down NOW" thing.

The announcement came and the student kept writing. And writing. As students filed down with their papers. Openly defied the time limit and continued for 10 more minutes.

Finally approached the desk. "I'm sorry I cannot accept your exam, you didn't put your pen down."

The student. "I don't think you understand exactly who I am."
The proctor smirked, "It doesn't matter who you are. Rules are rules."
Student : "Do you mean to tell me you don't know who I am !? You have no idea whatsoever just who I am!"
Proctor : "No and I don't care!"
Student : "Good!"

He puts his paper in the middle of the pile and walks out.


Dec 8, 2012

What is the best advice your father ever gave you?

"You're different. Stay different."


Dec 9, 2012

Does teaching intelligent design in schools really damage science?

I will now proceed to step in it.

I wish people could talk about this issue.

There are two entrenched, polarized, bitterly opposed camps. It got all mixed up in religion and politics. Some elements of the Christian Right are trying to smuggle religion into schools under the guise of Intelligent Design. A vocal group of atheists is trying to stop them.

The central debate is really about educational policy, not science. Which is too bad.

Because. Because. Ahem. I'm getting ready to say it. About to say it :

The creationists have a point. A scientific point.

Don't taze me, bro! Put down that tire iron. I come in peace. Listen :

We really don't know if life can emerge from random chance. We really don't know if evolution alone can produce the complex life-forms we see on earth.

It comes to this : What is the probability that this molecule will emerge from an inorganic soup ?

Because we've never been able to replicate it. We see no sign of it anywhere else in the cosmos. We can't rewind the earth and test the hypothesis.

What's the number ? Given a soup of X size, appropriate soup spoon to stir the pot (lightening bolts, volcanic eruptions, whatever) and a couple of billion years, what's the probability ?

1/10^10 ? 1/10^200 ? 1/10^1000000000000000000000000 ?

Can we ask this scientific question without cooking the books (as many Christian writers have done) and without being lynched by atheists ?

Is life the result of an event which is so rare it occurs once-a-Cosmos, if you're lucky? Is there evidence that there may be something which nudged the process along ? I don't know what the hell that something might be. A mystery.

It's a tough probability problem.

As for evolution, we certainly see life evolving into more complex forms. Some of it is pretty surprising : Through mutations and natural selection fins become arms and then wings.

What is the probability of those mutations? What is the path of intermediate steps whereby an arm becomes somewhat wing-like, gets selected, and then more wing-like?

What are those numbers?

The Intelligent Design camp is completely full of crap because they pretend they can do these calculations and found the probability is near zero.

The evolutionists are also full of crap because they say the matter is settled. They refuse to exercise scientific doubt on the issue. They can't do these probability calculations either.

Nobody can. Yet.

Einstein doubted the most fundamental and obvious notions of time and space, whose validity had been established by centuries of experiment since Newton.

Doubt is OK. Doubt is scientific. Science is full of doubt today. We still don't even have a working model of physics that scales from particles to galaxies.

Can the Creationists drop their bible and the atheists drop their tire-irons and clear the field for scientists to doubt, to test, to consider crazy ideas, to challenge the consensus?

What are those numbers?

Can we talk about that ? Maybe even in schools?


Dec 9, 2012

Why did Japan choose to attack the US when it did, despite its inability to bring the war to US shores?

Oil.

Japan needed oil.

In 1941 Germany was winning the war and it looked like the Soviet Union would fall. The US had halted oil exports to Japan.

There was oil in South-East asia. Japan's primary concern was to secure those oil reserves and protect the shipping lanes back to Japan.

All of which was a cake-walk except for one thing : The huge American pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. It was their Achille's heel.

It would be useless to secure oil imports into Japan if the Pacific fleet sunk the boats. Were the Pacific Fleet to manage a blockade, Japan would quickly choke to death.

So they took a bold gamble : Knock out the fleet in one sweeping, massive blow.


Dec 9, 2012

Was Malcolm Gladwell right to say that Steve Jobs will be forgotten in 50 years?

Invention is part of the American mythos.

We don't forget Inventors. Especially rags-to-riches stories.

Quick : tell me what Thomas Edison did. OK, how about Andrew Carnegie ?

The former was the last century's greatest inventor, the latter its greatest philanthropist.

Did Edison really invent the light bulb? Nope. Nobody cares - he popularized it.

Jobs will be remembered for "inventing" the personal computer, both desktop and handheld. Which people will use to look up who Bill Gates was.


Dec 10, 2012

How can Waze be improved?

Pedestrian mode.

I know waze was designed for commuting and traffic avoidance, but the social networking features could really catch fire for people walking around an unfamiliar city.

Privacy concerns, sure.


Dec 11, 2012

What's the nastiest way to break up with someone?

By text message. On their birthday. From their sister's phone.


Dec 11, 2012

What are some tips to stay focused during lectures and homework?

I had a terrible time focussing during a lecture, though I really shined in certain areas and often on exams.

A couple of tips :

Is there any subject in which this doesn't happen? Something that just holds your attention? That may be your future major. If possible, take more of that.

The Socratic method always held my attention. That is, learning through a Q and A session, or a debate. Are there any classes like that? Note - some schools do this a lot. For instance, Phillips-Exeter Academy employs the "Harkness" system, whereby students learn by discussion at a round table.

Speaking of discussion, it may help to prepare for the lecture. Come up with questions.

Thirdly, are you ... "gifted" ? By which I mean are there some things you have been told you are freakishly good at? You may not be challenged enough.

While ADHD is a popular diagnosis these days, and certainly worth a look, the fact remains that lots of lectures or teachers are just plain dull. High school is not forever and college privates more opportunity for self-study.


Dec 12, 2012

What is something you believe that nearly no one agrees with you on?

People belong in villages, not sequestered into houses in the suburbs or tiny apartments in the city.

Our natural state is to be surrounded by dozens of friends and hundreds of acquaintances. This is very hard to do in both cities and in the suburbs. It takes a smallish town with a center where people gather to pursue their love of music, art, and other creative pursuits.

We've built a very lonely country. It takes a village to nourish the soul.


Dec 13, 2012

When will Google Maps navigation will be available for the iPhone?

Now (12/13/12). And it's awesome.


Dec 13, 2012

What is the best way to get what you want?

Want what you get.


Dec 13, 2012

What material was the filament of Edison's light bulb?

Edison kept fidding with materials for years.

Interestingly, he first hit the 1200 hour mark (50 days of continuous use) using a bamboo derived filament which was carbonized.


Dec 13, 2012

With pure management background does completing a Software Engineering degree or attending one of the Programming Bootcamp broaden the opportunities in the tech startup job market?

Absolutely.

Facebook and google, for example, have been known to ask manager candidates technical questions.

In the startup world, there are few pure managers. All hands to the pumps. You never know when, with some pluck and googling, you might be able to unjam something.

Also, engineers sometimes don't respect people with no development knowledge at all. Usually. Always.

So take a crack at it! Python is a favorite recommendation of mine because you get big returns for little code but whatever floats your boat.


Dec 13, 2012

How would you complete this joke: "A Quoran walks into a bar…"?

EDIT :

... and Charlie Cheever walks out."

Too soon?


Dec 13, 2012

What is your most unshakeable belief?

Humans have souls. They aren't a series of electrochemical interactions.

There is a ghost in the machine.


Dec 14, 2012

What is the best iPhone app?

Google Maps is out for the iPhone and it's awesome.

TLDR : Get this app. Get it now. Right now.

"There shall come to pass a general confusion as to ... where things actually are."
-- Monty Python, The Holy Grail.

This is the story of my life. I have no sense of direction at all. I drive and walk around in desperate circles; it is safe to say I am never really certain where I am. Just different shades of lost.

I stepped away from my coworkers at lunch the other day to buy some smokes 2 blocks away. I returned 45 minutes later to find my lunch in a box and my coworkers wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

I've tried navigation software with mixed results, especially when walking. I gather that GPS works best the faster you're moving because it detects a doppler shift in signals coming from satellites. Or something. All I know is, on foot, no GPS software on my iPhone could accurately tell me where I am and what direction I'm facing.

Which is weird, because Apple's compass app works fine.

After getting lost again yesterday (12/12/12) taking a coworker to breakfast, I posed this question in desperation :

What is the best iPhone navigation app for walking?

A mere 12 hours later, I didn't just get an answer.

I got a miracle.

Google Maps for iPhone was released.

Jesse Hollington's answer to What is the best iPhone navigation app for walking?

4 AM. I downloaded it. I fired it up. It's awesome. It's beyond awesome.

Standing in my hotel room, it knows exactly where I am. I type in the name of the place I had breakfast. Bang, found. I turn my body 15 degrees, the map instantly turns with me. Drop to 3D view and it's pointing the way to go.

Go to street view, and I can see the diner and sweep the world around it by turning the phone. On a sluggish old iPhone 3G.

Pull up a tab, and I can read reviews of the place. Share it out to facebook.

I've only played with it a half hour. This is no app. It's a revelation.

Thank you, Google. Thank you.

I once was lost.

But now I'm found.


Dec 14, 2012

What is the greatest prophecy ever fulfilled (in reality, not fiction)?

In 1901, Sir Winston Churchill pleaded for peace in Europe. He warned that a new type of war was on the horizon. That "mighty populations" would turn against each other with ruinous ferocity. This was 13 years before the outbreak of World War One :

"In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings." -- Winston Churchill, 1901


Dec 15, 2012

What do you think about President Obama crying during his response to the Newtown shooting?

There are times when a great leader must drop the pretense to greatness. When we need to see their simple, wobbling humanity in all its frailty.

It's not new, our leaders do it all the time.

There's a time to cry :

President George W Bush at the memorial for a soldier who threw his body on a live hand grenade to spare his fellows :

Former president Bill Clinton at a memorial for the victims of 9/11 :

Jesse Jackson - the man who was standing next to Martin Luther King when he was assasinated, has just learned that an African-American has been elected President of the United States :


Walter Cronkite, "The most respected man in America", cries during a live news broadcast. Word has just come in that John F Kennedy lay dead in Dallas.


Dec 15, 2012

Should kids (teens/non-adults) read Quora?

I think teens definitely should (>=13). It's the new global Academy (in the ancient greek sense of the word.) I shouldn't be surprised to see a new generation of "native Quorans" flood the top schools in a few years.

Kids? (<13) Nah. It's against Quora's policy, What's the minimum age requirement for registering on Quora?. Myself, I make liberal use of f-bombs and such in my answers when I feel they fit. As in : Christopher Reiss's answer to What does smoking cigarettes feel like, and should I try it?

A Quora-for-kids is an interesting prospect; where perhaps all communication would be moderated by parents.

But this ain't it.


Dec 15, 2012

What are some of the wittiest quotations?

"When you walk a mile in another man's shoes, you're a mile away from him -
and you've got his shoes!" -- Stephen Wright

"If you were my husband, I'd put poison in your tea!"
"If you were my wife, I'd drink it." -- Winston Churchill

"Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon." -- Abby Hoffman

"I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead." -- Woody Allen


Dec 15, 2012

What does it feel like to be racially profiled?

I'm "swarthy", once i've gotten some sun. I've a good dose of Armenian heritage, and bore somewhat of a resemblance to Mohammed Attah shortly after 9/11.

I was flying from Louisiana to Boston. I got pulled out of line once, twice, three times. Then a *fourth* as i was about to board.

Arms up, identification out, "Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your job?"

I understood. People looked away, embarrassed for me. Some guy from the middle east was next to me, very upset.

This is not PC, but I understood.

When Swedish-looking people start hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings, they'll get pulled out of line too.

It's OK.


Dec 19, 2012

What are the most probable disasters yet to occur?

An ice age is coming.


Dec 20, 2012

How frequently are truth drugs used by different agencies around the world?

"Truth serums" were in vogue during the cold war. They're not used much any more. They don't really work.

Most of them are like booze : central nervous system depressants. And they deliver results similar to booze. While inhibition is in fact lowered, what you tend to get is a rambling mix of facts, fantasies and random confabulation.


Dec 20, 2012

Why is there so much gun violence in America?

I like John Taylor Mathews' answer, it suggested to me the following bit of speculation :

America was founded by hunters.

When the US was first colonized, Europeans who lived in cities or on farms were transplanted to a vast wilderness teaming with game. Normally a society advanced enough to possess firearms pushes wild animals out, settles and farms available land.

Technology did not gradually appear in the United States, it suddenly landed. This created a rare juxtaposition of abundant game and availability of guns.

So everybody hunted. Being American meant having a gun and knowing how to use it. During the Revolutionary War, the British feared American snipers whose aim was legendary.

Perhaps this is how guns became such a central part of the American psyche.


Dec 20, 2012

What are the disadvantages of Python?

When you're using it as a web templating language (web2py), that feature that indentation has semantic effect is a huge pain in the ass.


Dec 20, 2012

What are the most important tips, tricks and habits we can learn from Quora's "Top Writers"?

i'm not a power user, but have been active on Quora a while and learnt a thing or two about how to get by. In addition to Garrick Saito and Jon Davis' great answers :

Stay out of flame wars. People don't read long-winded, contentious debates in the comment threads. It's a serious waste of your time. Give someone who disagrees the last word. I sometimes upvote criticism for being cogent or just plain funny. Quora's edict of Be Nice, Be Respectful isn't just policy, it's part of the culture. By flaming somebody - even if they deserve it, you lose the respect of the community.


Dec 20, 2012

What might have caused carnivorous dinosaurs such as the Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus to become so large?

A long period of stable climate combined with a lack of mammals.

Sheer size gave herbivores and carnivores a big advantage (nobody fucks with an elephant).

But they're not very adaptable. Having to eat that much doesn't fly in times of famine.

And they become basically immobile if temperatures drop because they were cold-blooded (though that has recently been called into question).

Requiring lots of food and heat is a recipe for ice-age extinction.


Dec 21, 2012

What are some ways investors have screwed over an entrepreneur who is raising money?

ArsDigita had a contentious and public falling out between its founders and the VC firms Greylock Partners (venture capital firm) and General Atlantic Partners. This is required reading for software startups, I believe.

The founder Philip Greenspun writes this : ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up

"At this point you might ask "Hey, weren't you still on the Board?" Sure. But for most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." – Paul Graham


Here's what Eve Andersson, girlfriend of Philip Greenspun at the time and cofounder, wrote (She appears to have taken it down but it got archived):
Diary of a Star

"It became increasingly clear to the employees, the customers, and the outside developer community that the VCs and those they had put into management had no idea what they were doing. They discarded the practices that had made ArsDigita a profitable company, destroyed the company culture, and showed their complete technical incompetence"


"What has ArsDigita been doing over the past year?
Lying to the employees and to the press:"


"Over the past 1.5 years, the VCs and their management team have taken a profitable, healthy, interesting company and:
spent the profits that ArsDigita had saved
spent all the capital raised
destroyed an excellent software product
released a horrible product a year behind schedule
hired a slew of incompetent managers
fired the people who made ArsDigita profitable
repeatedly lied to customers
repeatedly lied to employees
repeatedly lied to the press
repeatedly lied to the outside developer community
and given themselves big bonuses as a reward
Greylock and General Atlantic Partners have mis-managed ArsDigita into the ground." – Eve Andersson


(strangely, Eve Andersson was a meme in the early day of the internet when, as a student at CalTech, she put up a web page showcasing her fascination with Pi.)

From the other side of the conflict, Michael Yoon was part of the VC-installed management. He wrote this rebuttal :

ArsDigita: An Alternate Perspective

".. Eve's thesis is clear enough to me: Venture capitalists = Satan."


So what does this say about Philip, that he so poorly qualified his own investors? It's not as if Philip met Peter and Chip for the first time on the day after we got the money. ... If nothing else, Philip is at least guilty of inadequate due diligence.


"Not long after the funding came in, Philip informed us in one of his company-wide emails that he had hired a man named Jim Monk to be "Director of Facilities." Jim's job was to manage the logistics of acquiring new space for our existing offices and finding space for the new offices we were opening in other cities. At our peak, we had offices in Cambridge, Berkeley, LA, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Munich, London, and, for a little while, Oslo. ... As a company with a peak run rate of $25 million per year, we spent an inordinately large amount of our capital on real estate. Rent became a large component of our escalating burn rate."


There were other expenditures of the VC money that cannot be attributed to "the VCs or their management team." The easiest targets in this category are the artwork and the fish tanks. A typical ArsDigita office was decorated with framed prints of Philip's photography and big (in some cases, enormous) aquariums filled with tropical fish.


Again, Eve views pre-VC ArsDigita through the distorted lens of nostalgia. Of course, the downfall of ArsDigita was not due solely to the weaker economy, though "weaker economy" is a bit of an understatement. More accurately, the Internet bubble and almost everything that was suspended on its surface, including ArsDigita, collapsed. ... most of our clients, both pre- and post-VC funding, were VC-funded dotcoms that started to drop like flies.

Certainly, the cost structure created by opening so many offices and hiring so many people at premium salaries, as discussed above, was [also] a factor.

Dec 21, 2012

How do I test my prototype/wireframe with my target users being abroad. Before I create a MVP how do I find out if there is enough traction for my product?

Forget stealth mode.

Build your Minimal Viable Product.

Release it. Watch and listen.

There's just no short cut.


Dec 22, 2012

What will be the biggest news story of 2013?

(Written 12/20/2012)

Microsoft becomes a major mobile contender.

I walked into an AT&T store in Boston.
About 70% of the shelf space was for the latest. Windows Lumia

I don't like MS and generally rout for them to fail. But I found the Lumia more fun. The UI is slicker and more rewarding: Just a joy to play with, and a more social centric design.

The iPhone looked kind of drab in comparison.

To me, that's the whole game. I don't think most consumers do a lot of research for their phones. I think they walk into a store, screw around and go with their feeling.

The Lumia delighted me more than the iPhone and android.

I think Microsoft, for the first time in its derivative, dreary and destructive life (told ya has bested the completion in design and shelf space.

EDIT : (update 12/27/12) Mark Cuban: My Nokia Lumia “crushes” the iPhone 5


Dec 23, 2012

Could you describe for me a nice thing you have just done for a random stranger?

EDIT: Don't read this yet. It's a draft-saved error, I'll fix it soon, am traveling at moment.

No credits for me but thanks.

I so have a story though, and it wasn't until this question appeared in my feed that I thought to write it down.

It is no tale of heroism, just an ordinary act of kindness that many (if not most) would have done. It's not really about me at all. I guess it's about the world, or fate or something.

I was waiting at a bus stop in Lynn, Massachusetts.


Dec 24, 2012

What are the theories that discuss different kinds of intelligence, apart from Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence? What about fluid and crystallized Intelligence? What is the current established understanding in this area?

Oh, Aristotle. The western world is still not over you.

He loved categories. He seemed to believe that everything in nature can be divided and subdivided. Genus, species, and so on.

It really caught on, and Westerners - especially Americans - love to measure and sort things.

What's my personality type? What's my Intelligence Quotient? Emotional Quotient? My Autism Quotient?

Quotients.

The mind is the most stunning and mysterious thing in the universe. Somehow, the universe constructed a Thing that - surprised to be here - looked back at the cosmos that created it and asked Why? How?

"Burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo of the machinery of night."

The mind is not reducible to a number, or a vector of 10 numbers, or a thousand. To attempt this is to miss entirely the profound mystery of your own sentience.

How many intelligences are there? None. Or, the population of the earth - one for each mind. Or whatever.

You're looking at this all wrong.


Dec 25, 2012

How can you earn your doctor's respect?

* Be honest. Don't hold back about smoking, drinking, and other behaviors.

* Understand most treatments are not magic spells, but rather a trade off. That antibiotic may mess up your stomach. That pain killer may make you itchy. It's about progress, not miracles.

* Take care of yourself. If you eat too much, smoke, and don't exercise you're working against your doctor.

* if you're prescribed a controlled substance, don't EVER "drop it in the toilet" or "lose it". Secure it and handle it in a trustworthy way.

* Keep a positive attitude.


Dec 25, 2012

Who was Britain's greatest military foe (individual) since C17?

All these answers are great, and I would add General Marquis de Lafayette.

The great hero of the American Revolution, we don't talk about him much because, I guess, we fell out with the French at some point for reasons I still don't understand.

Washington was no military genius, which does not diminish his monumental and honorable place in history. He was no builder of armies.

We heard the following tale in school : That the British lined up in fussy rows like fools. The colonists, wiley and informed by Native American tactics, possessed of superior technology (rifled barrels and bayonets), humiliated them on the battlefield.

Bullshit. Pure revisionism. The British had perfected musket warfare. Their orderly rows and timed shots formed a human machine gun.

The colonists were losing almost every battle until General Lafayette came. He drilled the troops in the same tactics. He built an army that could hold the line, reload fast and fire on time.

Lafayette also helped secure French arms, money, and naval support.

Those of us from the New England flash-points of the Revolution in Massachusetts and Connecticut see Lafayette's name everywhere. Rare is the town without a Lafayette street.

Due to him, Britain faced a disciplined and trained volunteer army of inflamed patriots to counter their ambivalent, professional army.


Dec 26, 2012

Was Bill Gates an Age of Empires player?

I doubt it.

Bill Gates has a documented obsession with not wasting time.

He once got so angry at a friend for being 15 minutes late to a movie that the friendship ended.

He has been heard to say he thought his health would fail him by 50. (He seemed to share this acute sense of mortality with his rival Steve Jobs.)

It would seem Gates would avoid a time sink like video games deliberately.


Dec 26, 2012

What single movie would you show to someone who had never seen a movie before?

Avatar.

Why not blow their minds?


Dec 26, 2012

The Cold War: How was the Watergate Scandal and President Nixon's subsequent resignation viewed in Soviet Russia?

Would be interesting to hear from a former Soviet.

The propaganda almost certainly cast the Watergate scandal as yet another symptom of the capitalist West's moral decay. I doubt much more than that was said to the public.

To those in power, they must have welcomed Nixon's departure.
Nixon proved a formidable opponent in two proxy wars :

Nixon unleashed hell on North Vietnam to force both the Soviets and the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. He also expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos.

When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Nixon airlifted 22 thousand tons of weapons to Israel, timed to coincide with the first arrival of Soviet resupplies. This led directly to the rapid defeat of the Soviet-supported Egypt and Syria.

And then there was Kissinger, considered by many to be the world's shrewdest diplomat. Kissinger opened up relations with the the People's Republic of China and negotiated separately with the two communist powers. He called this "Triangular Diplomacy" and used it to great advantage. It created suspicion between the USSR and China and gave the US greater leverage with both.

The team of Nixon and Kissinger jammed up the Soviet's foreign policy objectives, forced them to spend tons of money, and weakened their bargaining power.

The Soviets must have been quite relieved to see him go.


Dec 26, 2012

What should a person look for in a $2-3k starter motorcycle?

Hunt down a used Kawasaki Super Sherpa (250cc).


Great for back roads, but a very capable dirt bike as well. Comfortable, low riding position. A pot hole isn't going to take this bike down.

Great first bike for both on road and off. It can hit 65 MPH in sixth (!) gear but please - stay off the highway. That's for heavier, lower cruisers and experienced riders


Dec 27, 2012

Why don't "advanced" programming languages have GoTo in them?

GoTo makes program behavior much, much, much harder to predict.

When you have :

while (shit-goes-down)
if (shit-gets-crazy) then
GrabYourStuff( );
GetIntoShelter( );
LaunchMissiles( );
end-if
end-while

You can go back through the indentation and see that the only way the missiles get launched is if shit goes down and shit gets crazy.

Compare to

10 if not (shit-goes-down) then goto 500 #don't start a nuclear war
20 if not (shit-gets-crazy) then goto 10
30 GrabYourStuff();
40 GetIntoShelter();
50 LaunchMissiles();
.... ten thousand more lines of code ....

In this case, we see the missiles get launched if shit goes down and shit gets crazy. But anywhere in the later 10,000 lines of code we might have GoTo 50. Whoops. "Just search on GoTo 50!" OK but ... GoTo 40 also does it. And GoTo 30.

We can't look at line 50 and understand how the program got there. That's why GoTo's are bad. They leave no audit trail so you can check them.

Shit can get crazy.


Dec 28, 2012

Corporations: Which well-known companies are unusually powerful or monopolistic in areas have most people never heard of?

During the 20th century, DeBeers maintained a choke-hold on the world's diamond supply and sales. It took a revolt of a number of nations and corporations banded together to finally break the cartel :

The Incredible Story Of How De Beers Created And Lost The Most Powerful Monopoly Ever


Dec 28, 2012

What tangible, real-world benefits are there behind proving Fermat's last theorem?

I'll be blunter than others.

Not a damn thing.

What is strange about FLT is a) how devilishly difficult such a simply stated theorem is to prove and b) how nothing important depends on it.


Dec 28, 2012

Near Earth Objects: A 'soft landing' of a space rock must be possible - isn't it?

Well, assuming a soft entry into the earth's atmosphere, it'll get caught by gravity and start to fall.

it will then reach terminal velocity - the speed at which the air resistance equals the weight of the body.

So the question is - how soft will the landing be? In other words, how much kinetic energy will be delivered upon collission with the earth's surface.

Terminal velocity increases with mass, and kinetic energy increases with both mass and velocity, so the impact gets harder very quickly as mass increases.

A dust-speck will drift to earth and land like a feather.

A 3-ton sphere will speed up to several times the speed of sound and make a crater.


Dec 28, 2012

What are some of the funniest software bugs you have seen?

An Air Force drone was in the experimental stages.

It crossed the equator and and a value went negative.

The plane flipped itself upside down to compensate. Crashed.


Dec 28, 2012

What are the best body hacks that people should know about?

You can easily write backwards.

Suppose you're right-handed. Hold a marker in each hand, and place them next to each other on a white-board.

Start writing with the right hand, and make mirror-image movements with your left.

Your left will catch on instantly.
(I discovered this myself! It's tough for lefties.)


Dec 28, 2012

What are some of the best jokes you made up?

"I don't give an airborne copulation."


Dec 28, 2012

Who are some notable geniuses who suffered from a mental illness? We all hear that there is a connection between being a genius and being insane.

Kurt Godel was convinced people were trying to poison him.

Isaac Newton wrote letters accusing all sorts of people of conspiring against him. He would then follow up with apologies.


Dec 29, 2012

Did Hitler know Japan was going to bomb Pearl Harbor?

In addition to Will Coleman's deeply researched answer,

As a matter of military strategy, you wouldn't divulge the details of a surprise attack to anyone who didn't absolutely have to know. A single leak - one person - could sink the whole thing.

Also, the Japanese and Germans did not trust, like, respect or even understand each other. This was an alliance of shared short-term military objectives.


Dec 29, 2012

My ideal girl/boy is out of my reach; should I settle for what I can get?

Alright I'm going to pull age here. I been places. Seen things. Decades of victory and defeat, romantic harmony, discord and desolation.

I brought a phonebook with me and I'm going to be condescending. Deal with it.

First (*SMACK WITH PHONEBOOK ON HEAD) read the other answers here. Especially Feifei Wang, Oliver Emberton, Dan Holliday, Charles Faraone and especially Laura Breton. But the rest too. Really.

Second (*SMACK) what is this crap about the "ideal girl" ? What the hell is that?You look at somebody and they're hot and have a few interests you share and you imagine this girl is "ideal" !? She's just hot. Knock it off.

Get out there and meet people without this false criterion of "ideal". This is not "settling" (*SMACK). It's called "trying."

Find someone you're attracted to, who's attracted to you. That's actually the easy part. Not Oh-My-God movie star gorgeous (*SMACK). (How long do those movie-star marriages last?) But attracted.

Now comes the work. Days and weeks will go by. Do you really make each other happy? How do you both feel, once the novelty has worn off and you're just walking down a street together? How do you feel in each other's absence?
Do fights blow over quickly, or do they smoulder in a cycle of mutual recrimination? Is she quick to forgive? Are you?

You're going to discover your own flaws. Bad ones. Maybe you're insecure, or overconfident, or can't compromise. You'll screw it up. It'll hurt.

You'll probably lose the first one. And the second. And the third.

You'll have to break up with people you care deeply about because you're both making each other unhappy. You'll be amazed how hard that is.

Finally you'll find a good relationship. A good relationship will grow. You'll wake up every day and want to see them. You feel their presence when you're away from them. A movie's not quite the same when they aren't seeing it with you.

It gets stronger over time until each of you sheds any doubt about whether it's right.

So look. Listen. Don't duck, I'm putting the phonebook away.

*SMACK. When I was in my late teens, there was a movie called She's Having a Baby. And the last line of that movie took me decades to get. Maybe you can save some time.

"And in the end, I realized that I took more than I gave, I was trusted more than I trusted, and I was loved more than I loved. And what I was looking for was not to be found but to be made."


That's it. You can keep the phone book. With any luck, you'll need it some day.


Dec 29, 2012

Which countries have avoided the Great Recession, and why?

No country avoided the Great Recession. Except for remote societies completely off the financial grid, the implosion of the Western financial markets was felt around the globe.

The American banking system fell back into the arms of the government - it ran out of cash. The whole world came down with it.

However, one country - hid harder than most - has rebounded incredibly well.
Iceland. Who knows how these measures scale to larger countries (just 250,000) but here's what they did differently:

Threw their bankers in jail and seized their personal assetts. Yea, they really did that. Cuffed them and tossed them in the clink. This may have helped re-establish confidence in their own banking system.

Bailed out their consumers. Wiped negative-equity mortage debt off the books. Other debt relief measures erased debt totalling a billion dollars. (That's $4,000 for every person; $20,000 for a family of four.)

Cut government spending.

Raised taxes on the rich.

Took government control of their banks.

Refused to repay foreign creditors. "Fuck off, we'll get back to you when we're back on our feet."


Employment is near normal levels now and they are expected to post a surplus this year. Almost own home-owners are safe and sound in their homes.

Again, it's not clear what lessons big countries can take from this. But it's certainly worth noting.


Dec 31, 2012

How could the Quora iPhone app be improved?

A minimal rich editor. Just give us bold, italics, pictures and links to people.
Maybe bullets.

And nothing else.

Quora's about capturing awesome content. People are mobile. So improving mobile authoring is job one for Quora iMO.


Dec 31, 2012

Is there zero gravity at the Earth's center?

If there were gravity at the earth's center, which direction would it be pulling?

Assuming a uniform, symmetrical sphere, every direction would have an equal claim.

Zero is the only symmetrical solution to this.


Jan 1, 2013

Why are Nokia phones stereotyped as being indestructible?

I worked for Nokia for a couple of years, as they were struggling to make a smartphone.

I got to learn a bit about Nokia, Finland, and ruggedness.

The ruggedness of Nokias was a source of national pride for Finland. There was a story in the Finnish papers where a fisherman dropped his Nokia into the water. A week later it was found in the belly of a fish, still working.

These are rugged people. Their winters are long, dark, and brutally cold. Everything they build - from tool sheds to lamp posts - has this simple and elegant design of wood, metal and brick. You get the sense they intended to build it once and only once. Presumably because nobody wants to go fix it in a -40 °F blizzard.

A Finnish house by a prominent architect, it looks like it would shatter Godzilla’s foot :

I learned a Finnish word the Fins use to describe themselves: Sisu. It doesn't translate well. It means something like 'unbreakable'.

The Soviets tried to invade Finland in WWII. Finland's population was 3 million, the same as Massachusetts. The Soviets sent a million troops, expecting to shock them into a speedy surrender.

The Fins mowed them down. Over a hundred thousand Soviet troops lay dead and frozen in the snow (estimates range from 150,000 all the way to a million). Lacking anti-tank guns, the Fins destroyed 2,000 Soviet tanks by jamming logs into the treads and tossing Molotov cocktails into the gas tanks.

Sisu. Unbreakable. These are people who relax by sitting in a sauna and then jumping into ice water. These are Norsemen who scratched out a living above the Arctic circle. They don't know the meaning of 'disposable', and built Nokias after themselves:

To withstand anything.


Jan 1, 2013

What are the primary theses of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997 book)?

Geography is destiny.

Some societies leapt ahead of others in their development of technology. Diamond's thesis is that this was not due to race, genetics, or God.

It was simply that these societies - Europe, East Asia and later the United States, occupied wide swaths of (non mountainous) land along a similar latitude.

"Super crops" were developed that thrived on these bands. Docile livestock was similarly spread. So these well-fed people had time to learn things like smelt iron. Their population became dense and lived in close proximity to live-stock, exposing them to disease like smallpox. So they both carried and were immune to disease.

People from the right latitudes possessed guns, germs, and steel. Which tended to annihilate distant peoples on contact.


Jan 2, 2013

Why did people think Jerry Lewis was funny? And why did the French like him?

It took me a while to get him. I think he's funny now, but he's very much out of context with his American contemporaries.

He's a great physical comedian, like Charlie Chaplan a generation before. His character of Imbecile is deliberately over-the-top and annoying.

Imagine his character suddenly appearing in a stage play. He'd steal the show.

America in the fifties had taken a turn toward cool, subdued humor. The brat pack, Bob Hope. The sly quip over a glass of whiskey and a cigarette.

He was a funny guy very much at odds with the zeitgeist of his native country.


Jan 2, 2013

Has any president ever gotten off to a worse start than Barack Obama?

George W Bush entered the Oval Office in 2000 to accusations of a stolen election. Eggs were thrown at his motorcade.


Jan 3, 2013

What are people's biggest restaurant menu pet peeves? Details, design, etc.

Not a menu complaint per se but :

Take out places with the menu on a board above the counter.

DON'T ASK ME WHAT I WANT WHEN I'M OBVIOUSLY READING THE MENU!


Jan 3, 2013

Why is there so much static electricity where I live?

If it's just the light switch, yea - call an electrician.

Does it happen when you touch anything metal? (Door knob, radiator.). If so, your problem is low humidity.

Get a humidifier and I guarantee you won't get zapped again.


Jan 3, 2013

What is the appeal of Objectivism to intelligent people?

Objectivism is seductively pure.

Collectivism is evil and individualism is good. All ethics, morality, economics, virtue flow from a single source : The Self.

The rational mind craves clean systems like this.

In number theory people sought a perfect system with a finite number of axioms. Godel showed that to be a futile aspiration.

In physics we sought perfect laws to predict the motion of particles. Instead we found a universe that plays dice.

In game theory, we discover that rational agents acting in their self-interest often act against each other's self interest. They are all better off acting as a collective. We end up with this imperfect balance between individualism and collectivism.

Not clean. Not for numbers, not for particles, not for people. The rational mind rebels.

In vain.


Jan 3, 2013

What are some copy protection schemes that were never cracked?

The DRM in Microsoft's Silverlight player has never been cracked, as far as I know.

Thus Netflix can't be made to run on Linux, and you can't rip Netflix videos.


Jan 3, 2013

What would happen if a planet is a large spherical magnet?

To add to Robert Frost's answer : If we imagine a strong planet-sized magnet (like magnetized iron ore), we come upon the issue that magnets are dipoles.

Unlike gravity, there are two poles (often labelled north and south from compasses)

Where would the poles be?

If we placed them at the top and bottom of the sphere, I'm pretty sure the planet would crush itself into a disk. The north and south poles would be attracted and flatten the sphere as they moved toward each other.


Jan 3, 2013

What's the single most valuable lesson you've learned in your professional life that you will never forget?

Be the most honest person around.

"This is late because I totally fucked it up my first try."

"What is [insert term]? I've never heard of it."

"I totally forgot about that."

"I was able to move mountains in three hours because python has amazing libraries for everything."

Two things result from this. People who are honest themselves will trust and respect you.

Bullshitters will leave you alone, because they usually find honest folk unnerving.


Jan 3, 2013

What will be the reaction amongst Quora contributors when (and if) Quora goes public and Quora employees make a big payday?

I'm honestly puzzled by the minority of writers who think Quora owes them something.

Quora put up all this money for development and infrastructure to host your crap for free. They captured some of the best minds in the world and distributed your stuff to them.

"You wanna write? Have at it. Audience included. Here's thousands of topics which people are already waiting to read about."

I've always wanted to write and never could find a channel to (or the motivation).

Quora gave me both. You can't buy these things.

What's this talk about money?


Jan 3, 2013

Will dogs evolve to talk?

They've come as far as they can.

The domesticate canine is not quite the same species as the wolves from which it descended.

They are bonded to, and dependent on humans. It is a myth that - absent humans - domestic dogs fall back into a pack formation. In disaster areas - war or natural catastrophe - stranded dogs will seek out humans.

Dogs have learned how to communicate with us amazingly well. First comes the smile. This is my pup, Gideon :

Dogs smile. Wolves do not. It is theorized that when wolves first approached human encampments, the ones that learned to smile were rewarded with food and eventually - a warm place to sleep, a hunting companion, and a soothing stroking of the fur.

They understand a great many words and are keenly attuned to our moods.

They'll no sooner speak than humans will bark. That doesn't keep them out of our beds.


Jan 3, 2013

Is there anything in this world really worth dying for?

I think there are "Imperatives". One doesn't consider whether it's "worth dying for." It's instinct.

A madman opens fire with a gun and you throw yourself in front of a loved one. You walk by a burning house and hear a baby crying inside.

You don't think it over. You don't do what you think is best.

You do what you must.


Jan 4, 2013

What's the greatest graphic novel (or series of graphic novels) you've ever read?

Soaring above the rest : Watchmen.

Alan Moore's masterpiece. It is nothing short of high literature.

Intricate, complex, enormous. This series confronts our weaknesses and starkly illuminates the human condition.
The "Super-heroes" are just regular guys in masks (except for one - Dr Manhattan.)

The 'heroes' are deeply flawed and complex, killing innocents, losing their moral purpose.

History is re-imagined. America wins the Vietnam war, brutally suppressing the free thinking hippies and annihilating the Viet Cong, thanks to Dr. Manhattan.

Dr Manhattan has been made superhuman by a nuclear accident. But he's no superman. He begins to regard humanity with contempt :

"I am tired of this world. I am weary of these people and being caught in the tangle of their lives."

"You thought you could outsmart me? I have walked on the surface of the sun. The world's smartest man is, to me, like the world's smartest termite."

In substance and scope Watchmen has no rival.

(The title, by the way, derives from a Latin expression : Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [who watches the watchmen?])


Jan 4, 2013

Why doesn't Bill Gates run for president?

He's not exactly known for his people skills, to put it gently.


Jan 4, 2013

What are some of the funniest comments in source code?

From a pattern matcher I wrote a long time ago :

// I understood for only 10 minutes -
// the time it took to type it in. It seems to work.
// if you can understand it, please explain it to me - cjr


Jan 4, 2013

Is it wrong to say that I want to enjoy our time as long as we are together and not use the forever word?

It's a bit like saying "I hope you are happy until you are dead."

Factual? Sure. Honest? Yea.

But just doesn't come off right.


Jan 4, 2013

What is the simplest, most convincing explanation of the solution to the Monty Hall problem?

Try this :

You pick the first door.

The car has a 2/3 chance of being in the remaining two doors.

Take rooms #2 and #3 and bolt them together. Knock the wall down between them, so it's one big room with a left and right door. The car could be on either side, you don't know.

Still 2/3 chance it's in that big room.

Monty opens one door, showing you the side the car is not on (if it's there.)

Still 2/3, only now you know which side to pick.

P = 2/3.


Jan 4, 2013

What's a good problem someone getting into mathematics should try to prove?

My favorite. It requires no special knowledge at all, but a signicant flash of creativity.

Every point on a plane is colored either black or white. You have no idea which.

Prove there are two points of the same color one inch apart.

Edit : It's three colors, not two.


Jan 5, 2013

What are the most interesting (or surprising) law loopholes?

Native American Reservations are Federal Land, not subject to the laws of the state they reside in. There is no federal law against gambling.

Starting in the 1979, Native Americans started building casinos on their Federal land. States vehemently objected and legal battles broke out in lower courts across the country.

The little town of Ledyard, Connecticut was next to my home-town of Norwich. It was home to the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. This was just some rolling hills, a few houses and such. There was a sign as you approached which said,

"Welcome to the Mashantucket-Pequot Reservation."

In the early 1980's, they decided to build a casino. The biggest single casino in the world : Foxwoods. The state of Connecticut vowed to prevent it. The Mashantuckets-Pequots offered the state a cut of the profits, the state declined and the legal battle dragged on.

In 1986 the US Supreme Court upheld the sovereignty of the reservations over the rights of the states.

Connecticut asked if they could still have the cut of the profits. They received a one-word letter from the tribe : "No."

The Mashantucket-Pequots went ahead and built this in the quiet, rolling hills of Ledyard:


And they changed that sign at the entrance. It now said,

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE
SOVERIEGN MASHANTUCKET-PEQUOT
NATION.
Welcome to Foxwoods.


Unrelated Post-Script :
Here's another theoretical one (I thought up myself!) :

Get a pair of conjoined twins. One of them commits every form of white-collar crime known to man, fraud, ponzi schemes, whatever. The other keeps his hands clean.

The criminal can't go to jail because you can't imprison an innocent man.


Jan 5, 2013

What were the things your parents did right in raising you?

They encouraged my self-direction.

They let me choose my interests, and supported them from behind.

I got interested is music, they got me a keyboard.

I lost interest in that, but got fascinated with plants - watching things grow. They got me a terrarium.

They'd bring home books (they didn't have much money) as they appeared at used book stores.

I didn't like them. They kept trying.

Finally, one clicked: The chronicles of narnia. Then a wrinkle in time.

Suddenly, science fiction just happened to appear. Ray Bradbury. Isaac Asimov.

When I was 14 I got in trouble at school for sneaking into a room to use their only computer.

My father, who could not afford it, responded by buying me a Timex-Sinclair.

Everything I am good at, and indeed my livelihood were rooted in these experiences.

"Trust in a thing to know what it needs".


Jan 5, 2013

Are people who refer to themselves as "career oriented" just stupid and not worth dating?

"A career is a 20th century construct. I'm not sure what it means but I don't think I want one." -- Christopher McCandless of Into The Wild fame.

My values are similarly unconventional, I would interpret that to mean the person is unimaginative, insecure and trifling.

But as other answers have pointed out, that's probably an over-reaction.


Jan 7, 2013

Why does Quora seem to favor Google Chrome?

Chrome and Safari use the same rendering engine : WebKit.

WebKit is the new hotness. It has the largest market-share, and with more developers working to improve it - that share is rising while other browsers is declining :


These numbers probably tend to skew higher in Silicon Valley, where Macs and Linux are popular.

I would expect devs at Quora and other hot companies use Safari/Chrome themselves, so those browsers (again, same engine) get the most love.

You may want to switch to Chrome for that reason alone.


Jan 7, 2013

What do people think about the Microsoft Surface? This is about the tablet device and not to the tabletop machine, which has been re-badged as PixelSense.

Cupertino : We've got a problem.


(This is long, but full of bold and reckless claims that I hope reward the patient reader.)

I've been a computer junkie a long time. My first program was written on a teletype; the first computer I owned was a Timex-Sinclair.

I watched Jobs and Gates go at it for decades.

The unveiling of the Macintosh in 1984 to a standing ovation, Jobs barely able to hold back tears. The GUI and mouse are introduced to the masses.



Microsoft's copy-cat, inferior Windows licensed out to low-cost manufacturers in Asia. Stealing the UI from Apple and the business customers from IBM - securing the lion's share of the market.

The rise of Linux. Advancing at a glacier's pace for years until the web server market found itself under a mile of ice (in a good way).

The decline of Apple to the threshold of bankruptcy. The second coming of Steve Jobs in 1996.


Since then, Apple has made better stuff. Just plain better design, more reliable hardware. Apple got it like nobody else did. They alone made "lust-worthy" products that you ached to bring home.

They opened up entirely new consumer markets in portable computing: the iPod, iPhone, iPad.

Apple out-invented, out-designed, and out-marketed every other tech company on earth.

And let me add on a personal note, over all these years, I got pretty disgusted with Microsoft. Their OS was bloated and crashed constantly. Somehow, this kept getting worse until the craptastic Vista was rolled out after a 5-year development effort.

Microsoft gave off this... weird... karma to developers. They wouldn't publish known bugs in their tools. Their pride was more important than developers' time, who had to fall into holes Redmond knew about but wouldn't admit.

Their anti-competitive practices crushed a hundred startups. All Microsoft had to do to kill a startup was announce vaporware in that space. Investors would be scared off.

I rooted for the Justice Department to find them guilty of Anti-Trust violations and split them up.

I buy a Windows machine, and the first thing I do is wipe out windows and put on Ubuntu. The latter is faster, more stable and more secure.

I don't like Microsoft.

But. But.

I walked into the Microsoft Store in Copley Square in Boston last week. I saw something I have never seen, in all these years:


Sparkling innovation from Microsoft. A room-full of colorful, engaging and fun products.

Walk up to any screen, be it a phone, tablet or laptop and touch it. Tiles reward the most random gesture by doing something graceful and interesting.

There were so many different products I spent an hour going from one to the next.



A salesman named Thomas greeted my girlfriend and me when we first came in. We told him we didn't want to buy anything, we were just curious.

He spent an hour giving us a guided tour of every product in the store. He explained how the laptops, tablets and phones all sync content automatically.

He showed how the "Live Tiles" can be customized, rearranged, resized and how they display fresh content.

He showed us a tablet with a case that opens to reveal a membrane keyboard. I noticed a subtle design touch : as you open the thing - the hinge moves under the keyboard to incline it slightly to the perfect angle for typing.

It was the sort of barely perceptible touch of elegance we see from Apple - never from Microsoft and its hardware partners. Until now.

At no point did he try to sell us anything. At all.

We left dazzled. It was fun, it was fascinating, we wanted everything in the store.

We walked across the street to the Apple store. It was downright dreary in comparison. Those same fixed, lifeless, postage-stamp icons. Lacking a diversity of products, there were long rows of iPhones and iPads, all the same. Touch a laptop screen and nothing happens.

Bored, we left.

Apple: You are about to get your ass kicked. You have been out-designed and out-executed. Microsoft's offerings are suddenly more personal, more interesting, and more fun to use. Somehow they got it all right - from retail presentation to UI design.

The barbarians are at the gate and the lock is broken.

(I have no stake in Microsoft's success and haven't been compensated in any way for this post. In fact, I despise them.)


Jan 8, 2013

Why were children taught to hide under desks in case of a nuclear attack? Was this meant to protect children, or was it a psychological program? How was the directive distributed, and how did the public react to it?

"Duck and Cover" was really about flying glass.

Atomic blasts create over-pressure which turns glass into a thousand bullets blowing *into* structures.

The Pentagon did studies on the effect of an H-bomb (1 to 10 megaton.)

Close by, the population is vaporized.

Farther out, everyone is trapped under debris. From about 10-30 miles glass blows inward.

This ring has far greater surface area than the worst effects of the bomb.

The VAST majority of wounded was thus calculated to be from flying glass.

The Soviets tested a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb : It broke windows 560 miles away in Norway.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xaa1p1_must-see-tsar-bomba-king-of-the-bom_tech


Jan 8, 2013

Would you pay $12 / year to use a social network?

No, but you might get people to pay $10,000.

Elitism can sometimes have 'social gravity'.

Blackbook.


Jan 9, 2013

How do you learn to write succinctly?

(Insert qualifier about my not being an expert writer here.)

Americans sort of pioneered the very succinct writing style. Many attribute this 'clipped' style to Hemingway.

1) It may help to read Hemingway. I like The Sun Also Rises.

2) In your first pass, just dump all the contents of your head. Then, spend twice as long playing a game of 'strike-out'.

This is a lot like shortening a mathematical equation to simplest form.

To take a chunk of your deliberately long Question-details :

"But heaven help me, I have serious trouble writing succinctly. Sometimes I post a terrific answer on Quora, but it is several paragraphs long--Then I'll see someone else's answer, only one or two paragraphs long, which makes my point just as well! Are there articles, books, or classes on writing succinctly?"


Let's study this like some curious artifact which dropped from the sky.
Jst extract the key ideas :

"But heaven help me, I have serious trouble writing succinctly." - I can't write small.

"Then I'll see someone else's answer, only one or two paragraphs long, which makes my point just as well! " - Others can, and i see that it's better.

"Are there articles, books, or classes on writing succinctly?"" How do they do this?

OK, so let's take crack at tightening this :

"I can't seem to write succinctly. I often post good stuff, but others come along with shorter answers that I see are better. How can I learn to do that?"


OK, better. But a little clunky. Let's just stare at it a while and take another pass :

"I can't seem to write succinctly. My stuff is over-long compared to other Quorans. Any tips?"

That's not bad. I'd stop there.

There is also this : Not all of your sentences should be short. That can be a little jarring. It's a common form that your paragraph starts out short, then builds to larger and more complex sentence structures. An old trick of news writers was to tap out the rythm of their sentences with a pencil so they can hear the drumbeat build from short to long. It's up to you whether the paragraph ends in a long series of beats. Or a short one.

And let grammar yield to rhythm.


Jan 9, 2013

Can you use the fact that the Earth rotates to travel?

Not yet.

But Arthur C Clark suggested a way. (He predicted satellites so is worth listening to.)

A "space-tower" is built of super strong carbon fiber from the ground up (how far?)

You jump in a pod which expends energy to climb to the point that centrifugal force overtakes gravity.

As you accelerate upwards, generators repay the energy to the tower.

Zoom - free ride!


Jan 9, 2013

Boston just declared a public health emergency due to a flu outbreak. Should I get a vaccine now?

After posting this question, and being persuaded by Garrick Saito's answer to get a vaccine, word came in on Twitter : This year's strain (H3N2) is covered by the vaccine which is predicted to be 91% effective.

So this year's strain seems unusually bad and unusually preventible.


Jan 9, 2013

Obama Presidency: Second Term (2013–present): What specific U.S. defense spending should be cut or increased?

The United States maintains 11 aircraft carriers (out of a global total of 21).

We haven't fought a major naval power since WWII. They are useful for projecting air power across the globe but ... 11? Seems like 5 would do.

Our nuclear sub fleet, designed to assure the soviets we could retaliate a nuclear strike from undetectable undersea locations - even if all our land based missiles were destroyed - serves little purpose.

The 50,000 troops between North and South Korea would be of little use if NK attacked.


Jan 10, 2013

What is the hardest job everyone thinks they can do because they think it’s simple?

UX designer :

Not because it's enormously hard, but because everybody, and I mean everybody thinks they can do it.

UX is the art of reduction and elegance. People who look at an app invariably say "ooh! Add this!"

They don't realize the designer has already pushed 10 better ideas off the table simply because it clutters the interface.

Every "add this!" presents the user with a puzzle "what is it?", a decision "do I do it?" and dilutes the other features.


Jan 11, 2013

What are you banned from? Why?

I am banned by all my friends and loved ones from possessing : a blow torch, firearms, and explosives.

It's ... A long story.


Jan 11, 2013

What are the things when a programmer says project manager must listen?

"We don't know enough about this yet to make an estimate."

"You should cut that feature - it doubles the effort of the project."

"It works, but I hacked it together. I need time to fix my code."

"There's a development bottleneck (slow machine, absence of tools)."

"The schedule is all visible features. These will come in bursts because they are side effects of functional modules. Progress will be non-linear."


Jan 11, 2013

What can I learn in 6 months to get hired by a startup?

You can learn mobile app development in that time - provided you have a knack for coding. The only way to know is to try.

I'd suggest targeting iPhone app development; get set up and dive in.

Post Questions to Quora along the way.


Jan 11, 2013

What are the biggest problems in Enterprise IT?

it's a marketing term for 'corporate software'. You're not Captain Captain James T. Kirk (Star Trek character), you work at a bank.

it is imposed on a captive audience of employees. There is no market pressure to make it easy to use. One PowerPoint presentation to Captain Kirk and your Enterprise gets a crew.


Jan 11, 2013

Has the rise of nation-states been beneficial to humanity overall?

Not really. They seem only to protect their people from other nation states.

The way lawyers protect us from other lawyers :)


Jan 11, 2013

What are some of the most interesting little-known things? For example: fast food restaurant ketchup cups are expandable.

Facebook is blue because Zuck has red/green color blindness.

Electricity cycles at 60 Hz because electro-mechanical clocks used to measure time by the cycles. The same gear could be used to count cycles, seconds and minutes. EDIT : John Clover disputes this and is probably right. The rest has been fact-checked!

Crappy American beer resulted from WWII. Beer makers tried to target a largely female population with rationed grain.

You can boil water in a paper cup : just hold it over a flame. The water pulls away the heat before it can burn the paper.

The Japanese planes were detected by American radar on their way to Pearl Harbor. The radar operator ignored it.

Same thing for the Enola Gay as it approached Hiroshima.

At the Battle of Lexington, the colonists (numbering 80 or so) took one look at the British (500-700) and were in retreat when a gun went off (perhaps accidentally). Commanders on both sides ordered their men to hold fire to no avail.


Jan 11, 2013

What are some of the best signs made by homeless people?

Not quite a sign, darkly funny at best, but ...


Jan 12, 2013

Is it bad form not to at-mention someone when you mention their name in a Quora post?

The (iPhone) mobile app doesn't support this feature, so I think Quorans get some slack on this for the time-being.


Jan 12, 2013

What is the most aggravating thing a person can do in a meeting?

This is rare, but :

• Conducting a one hour monologue in an attempt to impress others. I've seen new people do this, rarely - they don't know the landscape but just can't get over themselves.


Jan 12, 2013

What are the prevalent ideas of life after death for atheists?

.


Jan 14, 2013

What are some quotes that have been significantly misused, abused, or misinterpreted?

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

Juliet is not asking where Romeo is. She is lamenting his *name*, that is - his family which is at odds with her own.

"I took the road less travelled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost

This is not a poem about defying normality. It's about the tendency to look back on one's life and regard it as more adventurous than it really was. It's not the road less travelled by at all. The key is this line,

"Though judging by the passing there, had worn them really about the same".


Jan 14, 2013

Why, for the most part, do Americans believe that one political system, democracy, is applicable to all countries and societies, while Chinese believe that each country must find its own political system, based on its own unique situation?

The only way to "let the country decide" is to ask the whole country. That is, hold an election.

Any other form of government does not exist by the will of 'the country'.


Jan 15, 2013

Why do some extremely gifted students perform poorly in school?

Gifted kids are eagles. They soar, dive, and circle at great heights. They can see farther and fly faster than anything else around.

Eagles .... Don't flock.


Jan 16, 2013

What do Americans think of George W. Bush?

W is remembered for being earnest, unlucky, a bit dim and a screw-up.

He couldn't evacuate New Orleans and led America and get Allies to war under a false pretense.


Jan 16, 2013

What's the most attractive material perk, besides food, that an early-stage startup can offer its employees?

Space and light.

Don't "density" people into a fluorescent lit cube farm.

Big open space, big windows.


Jan 17, 2013

As a typical 22-year-old, do I have enough life experiences to write the Great American Novel?

Faye Wang's answer gets some backup from Charles Bukowski :

So you want to be a writer.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.


Jan 17, 2013

What are the biggest frustrations about the Republican Party?

They are obstructing the rights of gay people to marry (even tho everybody sees it is coming to all 50 states eventually. They seem content to slow it down out of spite.)

They keep threatening women's reproductive rights.

Since Reagan, they haven't been fiscal conservatives. Now both parties spend like crazy.


Jan 17, 2013

Zero Dark Thirty (2012 movie): When Seal Team 6 entered the compound, why didn't Bin Laden and company have a plan to defend themselves or an escape route?

I think Bin Laden correctly concluded that his only defense was secrecy.

If he had surrounded himself with even a dozen guards, each one of them presents a risk that his location will be disclosed. (Say, by powering up and pocket-dialing a cell phone by mistake.)

An escape tunnel or a helicopter would also involve extra people and raise the risk of detection.

Once his location is known, it's all over. The US can dial his coordinates into a cruise missile and make a crater of his house, after which the rubble is scoured for DNA samples. Any defensive or evasive plan would be utterly futile.


Jan 17, 2013

Prejudice: I am a highly prejudiced person and profile almost every person I see. How can I cure myself?

Contact and conversation.

I was raised in a very white small town in Connecticut. *I* stood out as somewhat swarthy, and was even described by a girlfriend's relative as "not completely white" (I am 1/2 German-Jewish, 3/8 Scottish and 1/8 Armenian).

At 20 I had a head full of fear and suspicion toward non whites.

Then I met an African-American graduate of Harvard who also performed with Boston's Tanglewood Orchestra.

I became friends with a Muslim cab driver who explained how Muslims pray for Jesus and Moses. He invited me to his home for dinner. I fixed his computer.

I moved to a Brazilian neighborhood and saw how these families converted their tiny yards into lush gardens in which their children played.

My experience with real folk countered my prejudices over and over until the prejudice evaporated.


Jan 17, 2013

What are some clichés about life you've realized are actually true?

When you argue with an idiot, the idiot is doing the same thing.


Jan 18, 2013

What are some good math jokes?

What's purple and commutes?

An Abelian grape.


Jan 18, 2013

Why are there so few signatures on the whitehouse.gov petition for: Remove "in God we trust" from money and "under God" from our money?

Nobody cares, brah.


Jan 18, 2013

Was a lengthy US involvement in Iraq inevitable?

I think so, but it would have been very expensive and required many troops.

The policy of Clear, Hold, and Build was shown to work in patches where it was deployed.

One neighborhood at a time, troops clear an area of any armed resistance. Those same soldiers hold the area and build trust and rapport with the civilian population (and act as police force to prevent looting, etc.). Engineers move in the rebuild roads, plumbing, electricity, etc.


Jan 18, 2013

What beers are considered the most "manly"?

Any beer you can drop your keys into and not see them.

I vote Guiness.


Jan 19, 2013

Which words or phrases best describe important aspects of your country's cultural identity?

"Praise The Lord and pass the ammunition."


Jan 20, 2013

What are some of the most misused words or expressions in conversational English?

"Disinterested" doesn't mean uninterested or bored; it means impartial.


Jan 20, 2013

How is it that humans have evolved beautiful females, whereas in animals, the male is beautiful and woos the females?

Go in front of a mirror. Smile!

Were those lion's teeth? Naw, those are horse teeth. All those long, straight teeth in a neat pearly row.

Humans began as vegetarians. It was only with the advent of fire and weapons that we switched over to being carniverous.

The physically stronger of the genders did the hunting in almost all human cultures. Unlike lions (where the females hunt) we needed every edge we could get.

Many claim that men are more visual than women (any porn store clerk can back me up on this.). It seems that men have a greater response to visual stimuli.

My guess : We late-in-life hunters adapted to evolve males who hone in more visually on their environment to detect prey. Women were then sexually selected to become the gorgeous ladies we see all around us.


Jan 20, 2013

How far can an Aspie go in technical leadership?

Bill Gate's infamous rocking and monotone speech suggest the sky's the limit.


Jan 21, 2013

Consumerism: Everything you buy is designed to fail, so why did you buy it?

In my case, I have to question the assumption (a fine Quora tradition.)

I am interested in buying things that are designed not to fail. Part of the reason is that I'm a total klutz, I just seem to destroy everything in my presence.

My eyeglasses will get dropped and stepped on. As will my smart phone. Coats and packs will burst their zippers in months. I'm just rough on things.

Another is that something in me objects to a culture of consumerism. I don't want the latest anything. I seek out things that last.

I love Zippo lighters becaused they were designed to withstand combat conditions and light every time. The Zippo company has a guarantee that recalls an age of sturdy American manufacturing : This lighter is guaranteed to work ... Forever. If you get old, give it to your grandson, and it fails to work on his fiftieth birthday - mail it to us and we'll fix it free. No receipt.

I've got a Kymco motor scooter. It had a simple engine which predates computer chips and fuel injection. It is easily disassembled and repaired. It gets 100 miles per gallon. There's no reason it won't be running in 30 years, with thoughtful maintenance.

My first smartphone was a year ago. Not that I'm a Luddite, I just didn't need one and preferred an breakable dumb phone.

Finally I wanted mobile access to Quora, Facebook and the web. I went on eBay and got an iPhone 3G, jailbroke and removed the simlock. I put a sturdy, waterproof case on it. When the battery dies, I'll take it apart and replace it.

I haven't bought a new laptop in 10 years. My latest is a used dell Inspiron I bought for 300 bucks. I put Ubuntu on it, which doesn't stress hardware like windows does. 4 years ago and it's still running.

Why do I do this? I guess it's a form of protest against a consumerist culture. You don't have to participate as much in it either.

The great thing about a throwaway culture is there is awesome stuff lying out back in the dumpster. Just looking for a home where somebody - with a little care, will keep it going.

To wax a little hippy-mystical, I guess I believe that things have a sort of spirit. That it was made to fulfill a purpose, and is "alive" when it fulfills that purpose, "dead" otherwise. That we shouldn't just leave things to die.

To wax even more hippy-mystical, a quote from The Lion King,

"every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name."


Jan 21, 2013

Louis C.K. (comedian): What should you do when your pony bites?

A pony once bit my sister.

Pony bites can be ... Pretty nasty you know.

The author of this answer has been sacked.


Jan 22, 2013

Why do people write such lengthy answers on Quora?

Not all do.


Jan 22, 2013

Are there really any "bad" bosses in companies?

Lots of them.

Beware especially the self-proclamation, "I'm tough but fair."

It really means "I'm an asshole. To everyone, though, so that makes it cool."


Jan 23, 2013

What caused the JPG format to become standard?

Created in 1991, it was the only widely adapted "lossy" digital format. The web took off a couple of years later. Low bandwidths made JPEG indispensable to early web designers. (Along with its loss-free cousin, GIF).

Nowadays, PNG is becoming the open, non patent-burdened standard.


Jan 28, 2013

Which films/ documentaries/ TV shows are about Silicon Valley and/ or entrepreneurship?

Startup dot com, about the rise and fall of govworks.com during the boom.

The Social Network.

And the granddaddy of them all : Pirates of Silicon Valley.


Jan 29, 2013

Why do many smokers who otherwise don't litter feel fine tossing cigarette butts on the ground?

It's not. Cigarette butts are the worst kind of litter. The filters take forever to biodegrade, and the nicotine can be toxic to animals and children.


Jan 29, 2013

Great Athlete Debates: Whose fall from grace was worse: Tiger Woods' or Lance Armstrong's?

Amstrong betrayed his sport and his fans.

Woods betrayed his family.

Apples, oranges. (Personally I'd opt for the former.)


Jan 29, 2013

Why isn't bug reporting incentivised?

As Dave Cahill mentioned, sometimes they are.

In the many cases they're not, a few reasons come to mind :

Bugs piss people off - that's motivation enough to report it.

Any bug you find is likely a "known bug"; others hit it first and reported it.

There's already a backlog of other bugs more important than the one you found.


Feb 3, 2013

How can someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of film put this knowledge to use on a specific pain-point for film enthusiasts?

Well, you could ask someone their favorite movie, then point out how it's 'derivative' of some obscure Czech film from the 1930's.

"If you want to see a REAL movie ..."


Feb 8, 2013

Do any electronic cigarette juice brands certify their ingredients by 3rd party testing?

Here in the USA, things have got a bit weird. The sale and manufacture of ecigs (and liquid) is totally unregulated.

Much of it is imported from China as well.

Of particular concern is that nicotine levels are consistent, and that contaminants aren't present.

Here in the USA a company called Johnson Creek hires an outside auditor to test the nicotine levels of their product. They trumpet the results on their web site.

Many other online sellers do something similar. "E juice" should contain nothing but water, propylene glycol, nicotine and flavoring. We can expect companies to remain secretive about their flavoring a so long as nothing too weird is in there.


Feb 8, 2013

I have discovered that my partner has cheated on me. My partner doesn't know that I know. What should I do?

Dump her.

Them's the rules.


Feb 9, 2013

How are people in the Northeast preparing for *Winter Storm* Nemo?

We bugged outta Massachusetts before the driving ban took effect and are holed up in Nashua, NH at a quaint little cafe.

Some shops are open on Main street here, I might hit a cigar shop in a bit ...


Feb 9, 2013

What has been a quiet moment in your life that in retrospect is precious?

It was 1982. I was a skinny runt of a guy and my friend, Tim, was this huge towering ginger geek.(We were both straight, by the way.)

We went fishing. All night long, at a fresh-water pond called Boggy Meadows. Just some cigarettes, instant coffee, weed, and fishing gear. We drank and smoked and fished ... the stars went from brilliant to blurry and finally yielded to dawn.

We caught, I think, one fish as the orange rays of sunrise broke through.The crickets went silent, I made more instant coffee and Tim packed the bowl.

Tim wouldn't be alive this time next year. Depression.That was hard.

But I always look back not to his death but that morning, the taste of awful instant coffee over a campfire, of weed you can no longer get high from because you're so tired, the simple serenity of sunlight and friendship. Dawn.

I remember, Tim, wherever you may be.


Feb 10, 2013

What would the first line of your biography/autobiography be?

Big Bang ... blah blah ... earth cools ... blah blah life blah rise of civilization blah blah blah ...

OK! Now about ME !


Feb 10, 2013

Are you upset that so few people seem to be upset about the US's radical shift to the right?

The older among us notice something : We've been hearing this our entire lives.

An apocalyptic warning about a radical shift to the right or left. They said it about Kennedy, about Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama.

The pendulum swings as its always done.


Feb 11, 2013

What MidWest Startups have crossed $5M in annual revenue?

Walmart certainly meets that criterion.

Lots if people don't realize Walmart is a software company.

They innovated the extensive use of software to fine-tune their supply chain.
Sam Walden credits their success to this.

A few stores in northern Kansas suddenly sell out of a certain item. A program notices that demand is spiking in that area. A factory in china is contracted to send more units.

More shelf space is allocated to the item, and big displays are put up at nearby stores.

Warehouses are stocked in case demand further surges.

Similar items are sought and test marketed on the shelves.

All in software, automatically.


Feb 12, 2013

Why didn't John Boehner and Barack Obama wear a Green Pin (for Newtown victims) at the State of the Union?

There's an evolving precedent that presidents wear a lapel flag-pin and no other symbols.


Feb 13, 2013

Is this letter criticizing Quora legitimately from a VC?

What Michael Wolfe said. This is a clumsy and bitter publicity stunt by some disgruntled ex-user.

For me, this is the smoking gun, "However, any profit-sharing would be limited to the founders and not the actual content creators."

No VC on the planet would give a rat's ass whether content creators got equity. Giving away equity is the last thing an investor wants to do.

The resentment over not getting paid comes from a user. A user with a strange sense of entitlement which is not shared by the vast majority of content creators here, in my experience.


Feb 13, 2013

What is the most inspiring sentence you have ever heard or read?

“I never saved anything for the swim back.” — Gattaca (1997)

(Two brothers compete by swimming out into the ocean as far as they can. One is genetically perfect, the other is not. But the non-perfect one wins. When asked how this was possible, he gives this response.)


Feb 14, 2013

What are examples of blowback that have harmed US security?

The mother of all Blowbacks has to be the covert American intervention between the Afghan rebels and the Soviet Union.

The Americans trained the rebels (The Mujahideen) in every conceivable method of guerrilla war, including car bombs.

One of the CIA's star pupils was Osama Bin Laden.


Feb 14, 2013

Will "Your" for "You're" ever become acceptable?

Sure. And then probably to "Yor" or "Yer".

The thought bothers us. It bothers me.

I think it's worth considering the source of this upset.

Language - both written and spoken - evolves to become more efficient over time.
Like biological evolution, it begins with a mutation. A mistake.

The possessive "Your" and the contraction "You're" just happen to sound identical. This coincidence led to a common mistake.

Even those of us who know better will sometimes make it if we're going too fast, translating the spoken word in our head to the written word on paper.

When we see it in our writing ... It's wrong. We have to go fix it. We hope people realize it was a typo and that we do, indeed, know grammar.

When we see it in other people's writings, we are less generous. We think the person is an idiot. Learn your mother-tongue, for Cripe's sake.

And, of course, the uneducated don't even know it's a mistake. Our contempt for them seethes.

That's a lot of emotion over a tiny piece of typography.

But. As in biology, sometimes the coincidental mutation works. There's actually no need to distinguish between the possessive "Your" and the contraction "You're". At all. We get along with no spoken distinction just fine.

We are simply paying homage to the origin of the contraction "You're" with the apostrophe. Over and over and over again. Every. Single. Time.

At some point, eventually, people say "OK. We get it. But we're not going to type it any more."

And we balk. Language gets more efficient; we use the word lazy.

This fish, this mutation with legs for fins that occasionally disappears from the water altogether is ... doing it wrong! Our culture is degenerating into il-swimmeracy!


Feb 14, 2013

What does it feel like to be in your 40s?

I am calmer. I am less quick to anger and to judge. I let go of resentments and grudges. I'm a better listener. I appreciate the little things and am less selfish.

There are some physical aches and pains. A lot of old injuries from a reckless youth have come to haunt me. I can feel it when I stand up.

It's as if my mind conquered pain and now my body encounters it. A very good trade. It's not much, some stiffness in the bones and joints that fades quickly after some walking.

It'll progress, certainly, in the years ahead. Let it.

I'm happy.


Feb 15, 2013

Can we produce energy/ light from living plants?

There are plants that give off light all by themselves. This is called bioluminesence. It's pretty cool.

Bioluminescent 'shrooms :


Feb 15, 2013

What are some examples of Quora listening to its users?

Rich editing features added to iPhone app in response to many requests.

Marc Bodnick makes the Angry Bodnick Memes picture his Quora profile.


Feb 15, 2013

If I invent something which has a chance of earning billions if brought to market, what should I do to prevent others from cheating me out of what I deserve?

To put a bit of a finer point on the other answers here,

You could invent cold fusion in a dixie cup using root beer and paper clips and the first hundred people you talk to will ignore it.


Feb 15, 2013

What is Quora doing right these days?

Easing the restrictions on Sharing

<- see that bullet? Rich editing features have been added to the iPhone app (Android almost certainly to follow)

Focused on user-growth and engagement, not monetization.

Giving recognition to important contributors via the Top Writers Group.

A soft Administrative hand : users sort out most conflicts for themselves.


Feb 15, 2013

What are some environments where the guys get hit on more often than the girls?

Iceland is known for gorgeous Nordic women who are ... Aggressive in that regard.


Feb 15, 2013

What was the company that destroyed the most wealth during the dot com bubble crash?

Enron took $60 B down with it.

Does any know of a worse case?


Feb 15, 2013

What are the best words or phrases you've coined or believe you did?

Airborne copulation. As in, "I don't give a flying ...".

Cranial-rectal inversion. "You've got your head up ..."

Scrubtard : Neat freak.

Opticylindrical Compulsion : The irrepressible urge to look through a tube.


Feb 15, 2013

Why doesn't he talk to me anymore? Can I fix our relationship?

I don't know, man. It could be because you're a freshman and he's more senior, that can make things weird.

There isn't alot you can do about other people's behavior. There may be no reason to it. Might be time to explore other friendships.


Feb 15, 2013

Baltimore Ravens: Who the hell is that standing next to Joe Flacco?

That is Marky Ramone, former drummer for the Ramones.

Downloaded the pic and did a google image search.

Flacco makes Fashion Week debut at Tommy Hilfiger

Here's where to do image searches : http://images.google.com/


Feb 16, 2013

Why does it seem that nobody is concerned in the least about the meteor that hit Russia yesterday? Why is it being underplayed so much, on Quora at least?

Natural disasters happen.

Damage to people and property was minimal.

There's nothing we could have done about it.

The news coverage I saw in the USA was pretty sensationalist, I thought.

You're right - had this exploded over Kansas, it would have been the lead story all day long. But not in Russia. News media gives priority to local news everywhere.


Feb 16, 2013

I am a sophomore studying Computer Science at UC Berkeley. I do pretty well in classes that are more focused on theory and algorithmic analysis but not so well in classes that are focused on projects. My friend however, seems to complete projects with ease and has much less difficulty understanding project requirements/implementation etc.How can I make myself better at projects?

Practice building things.

I understand your issue; I majored in math, not computer science. I learned to program independently. Here are some tips I learned about putting theory to practice :

Get good tools, and get fast at using them. An editor with autocomplete for the language you're working in. A good debugger.

Use libraries or code snippets (if allowed) wherever possible. Don't write code just because you are able. Save yourself the time of coding it, debugging the edge cases, and the risk that a nasty bug remains.

Iterate. Get to minimal functionality first. Ignore efficiency, code elegance - just bang it out till you have a sort of proof of concept.

"Make it work, then make it fast." Once the thing is minimally working, make it more efficient and put in lots of error checking.

If you're stuck on a bug for more than an hour or two, stop. Do something else. There is usually something unexpected which has escaped your attention: a new approach, or a hidden subtlety, or a misconception in your mind about what's going on. You need to clear your head.

Start your project early enough to do the above.

Don't expect linear progress. Your project will be a buggy, crashing, slow, misbehaved beast until it isn't.


This is how programmers do actual work, by the way.


Feb 16, 2013

Can any argument be made that media piracy is justified?

There is a case to be made that intellectual property has no basis in nature or reality. That it's made up.

If two primitive men encountered each other, one trying to take the other's spear would invite trouble and be immoral. We know that instinctively.

However, noticing the spears clever design and making your own would be fine. To insist nobody can make a spear like mine would be laughable. We also know this instinctively.

Intellectual property is a recent idea. I'd argue it resulted from new technology of transmission.

In 1200 AD it wasn't possible to get rich by writing, singing, composing. These were all one-off performances. They couldn't be reproduced and broadcast.

Then came the printing press, the phonograph, the movie theatre. Now the content could be served to millions. Content creators got rich.

But technology wasn't done yet. The personal computer and Internet enabled us to copy and RE-broadcast content.

So now it's not possible to lock content down. As Richard Stallman put it, "information wants to be free."

The notion of intellectual property can be regarded as a dysfunctional artifact of a temporary technical imbalance : Few broadcasters, millions of receivers.

Technology gave artists riches and a captive audience. Technology has now taken it away and empowered consumers instead.

I don't agree with any of this. The consequence of this view is that expensive content won't get made.

But it's not an argument that can be cast aside lightly, I believe.


Feb 17, 2013

How can Christians and believers in other religions even begin to justify their belief in the face of overwhelming proof that what they believe in is obviously fake?

There has never been proof - overwhelming or otherwise - either way.


Feb 17, 2013

What are the biggest problems and drawbacks of modern Western civilization?


Feb 18, 2013

What does this couple on Facebook's new homepage symbolize?

Lipstick won't make you taller.


Feb 18, 2013

Why do people believe in the ancient aliens theory?

Well. Let me first say that the History Channel's Show, Ancient Aliens, did much to popularize it.

Let me also editorialize that that show is the most bizarre compendium of reeling anti-thought I've ever seen. I use it to fall asleep sometimes because it turns my brain off (seriously).

But the theory isn't really that crazy. Sober and sane people do think :

There is a good chance of extraterrestrial life and even intelligence. Just look at all the scientific talent behind SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), the Kepler satellite-telescope (designed to look for earth-like worlds in other solar systems - exoplanets). I have no hard numbers but a majority of scientists seem to believe that we are not alone.

The rise of human civilization entails things we don't understand. For example, we're not sure how and why megalithic structures were built using rocks weighing many tons. We don't understand why certain figures were built which could only be seen from the air. For another example, it was 2 thousand years after their construction that the Nasca lines were first seen by airborne humans :

The rise of human civilization and techology was very sudden. Humans appeared at least 200,000 years ago (recent evidence suggests it may have been much earlier.) For 190,000 years we lived pretty much as Neanderthal. Fire, spears, small tribes of hunters. Only in the last 10 thousand years do we see this terrific acceleration in technology, beginning with these first megalithic structures at Gobekli Tepe :


8 thousand years later, the Colloseum of Ancient Rome :


Some of the artifacts are curious in and of themselves. The ancient-alien nut-jobs have a fair question about this ancient artifact (from South America, 1500-300 BC) :

This thing looks like a bug - or a moth. Except that vertical fin in the back. That looks like the rear stabilizer on an airplane. What insect or bird has a rear stabilizer? Interestingly, somebody scaled this thing up, and put a motor in it. It flies. Really well.

Sure - it could be a fish. But it could also be a plane. It certainly looks more like the latter.

There's a lot of legitimate mystery looking back through human history, a lot of sudden leaps. There is a scientific consensus that the existence of alien intelligence is a sensible hypothesis.

So while this guy is certainly crazy, the theory that aliens intervened in human development, while unlikely - isn't crazy. It's science's job not to discount ideas just because some whack-job happens to be espousing them.


Feb 18, 2013

The founders funded and bootstrapped a product. We even have some paying and non-paying customers. But the revenue generated is not sufficient to build features and scale. How do we move forward?

If you've got users, and you've got revenue, you've crossed the big hurtles. You've proven your idea was good, that you can execute it, and you've validated a market for it.

A lot of startups would kill to be where you are (and die trying.)

It seems to me that a VC is your next step. That your startup is just the sort of thing they're looking for.

In your question details, you say "VC's are out of the question." Why is that?

I know there's a lot of lore about evil VC's, but you don't hear so much about the many successes they enable. In fact, they were instrumental in the success of virtually every service you use : Facebook, Quora, Google, etc.

You may want to rethink this VC thing.


Feb 18, 2013

How do Top Writers look in their Quora t-shirts?


Feb 19, 2013

If someone from the 1950s or earlier suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?


Feb 19, 2013

What is better than capitalism?

Looking out on the world's most robust economies and thriving societies, a mixed economy emerges as best.

A private sector (free market) exists along-side a public sector (state controlled). The free market is reigned in from regulation such as minimum wage, income tax, etc.


Feb 19, 2013

What are common problems of gifted people in the workplace (“gifted” being defined as people with an IQ in the top 2% of the population)?

Gifted people sometimes present the following problems:

They don't respond to traditional training. They tend to be autodidactic - a teacher only frustrates them and slows them down.

They don't work linearly. They aren't 10% done on day 10, and 100% done on day 100. Instead, they are 0% done for 35 days. Then they are 100% done on day 37. On day 45, they solve the problem at a higher level of abstraction that makes everybody else look dumb for starting the project that way in the first place.

They're good designers, writers, coders, business people. This upends the usual segmentation of these roles into different people.

The only way to manage them is get out of their way. Startups love them, big companies hate them for this reason. Startups want miracles, big companies say they do. But big companies really have one desire: to make your supervisor look competent and necessary.


Feb 19, 2013

What do you have to see someone do before you really know him or her?

Get angry.


Feb 20, 2013

I'm currently in the middle of my withdrawal cravings... how do I continue avoiding lighting up?

There's a few techniques lots of people use :

Keep your mouth happy. Sugar free mints, chewing on cinnamon sticks, sunflower seeds, pretzel sticks.

Avoid activities you associate with smoking, for instance, beer on your back-porch, whatever.

Engage in activities which preclude smoking (much easier since smoking is banned almost everywhere.) For example, going to the movies.

Join a support group. Go find a buddy who can talk you down from an urge to smoke at midnight.

Do deep breathing exercises (deep inhale through nose, hold to count of two, exhale through mouth.)

Put it off. "I'm not going to smoke now, maybe I'll cave in three hours, but not now." The intense cravings pass whether you smoke or not.

There are certain prescription drugs that may help, you can talk to your doctor about Chantix, etc.

Nicotine replacement therapies are available over the counter : lozenges, gum, inhalers.

More controversially, e-cigs are unapproved by the FDA and unregulated. Lots of smokers are switching over to them, but it's not clear whether it would be backsliding for you. I wouldn't go there if I were you, but it's an option.

Pay attention to your general health, get lots of sleep, eat well and drink lots of water. Your body is stressed during this transition.

You may want to try some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to discover how your brain is trying to trick you into smoking. Basically, when a craving comes, take not of what you were doing, what you were feeling and what the thought process was. Journal this stuff. Over time you begin to recognize the tricks and can stop them. This online forum specializes in using CBT to combat addiction.


Feb 20, 2013

What is the actual difference between 'hibernate' and 'stand-by' on a laptop (Windows)?

The other answers are good, but the short is this :

Suspend uses a trickle of power but boots up very fast.

Hibernate uses no power but boots slower.

Both retain your current working state (open windows, etc.)


Feb 21, 2013

If nicotine is the addictive component in cigarettes, why are people reluctant to use other, albeit, less harmful means like e-Cigarettes?

Just going by feel:

My first cigarette of the day makes me dizzy, ecigs don't. It feels like tobacco smoke delivers a sharper spike in nicotine blood levels.

Ecigs give a smaller bump with each puff. You never feel "finished" because your blood levels of nicotine don't hit that peak.

Again, going by feel. Somebody should research this.


Feb 21, 2013

Are e-cigs actually good for you?

Probably not.

The vapor is mostly propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin. This stuff is hydrophilic, meaning it attracts water.

So the effect is the opposite of steam : vaping actually dehydrates you.

So you should drink a lot of water.

While ecigs may benefit your health by way of harm-reduction, they aren't beneficial in absolute terms.


Feb 21, 2013

Where can I get good quality electronic cigarettes in UK

Here in the US, there also are very few stores to buy the better e-cig products. We buy them online.

The most reliable suppliers include www.vaporbomb.com, www.madvapes.com, www.myvaporstore.com.

All of these, I believe, ship internationally.


Feb 21, 2013

Should I run away from home? I want to be a writer and filmmaker, and my parents are very orthodox. I feel there isn’t enough room to spread my wings here.

At 21 it's not running away. It's just leaving :)

I'd finish your degree first since you're almost done. I did. Christopher McCandless (hero of Into The Wild) did. It's your ticket to opportunity that lasts a lifetime.

I share your sentiment, and love of Walden and Into The Wild.

If you make it out to Massachusetts, inbox me. I can take you to Walden Woods and show you where Thoreau lived and wrote by the lake.

And do remember : Christopher McCandless died because he was unprepared. Get that degree. Use the year to save money, make contacts, explore opportunities.


Feb 21, 2013

Le design d’un site pour vous c’est?

Pardonnez mon francais. Demanded-vous quel site que j'aime? Ou offrez-vous me faire un?


Feb 21, 2013

Social Dynamics: Why do people often in a group tend to speak a lot of nonsense otherwise not spoken in twos?

Here's an interesting study suggesting that in groups, the increased CO2 actually makes everyone dumber ... The Carbon Dioxide in a Crowded Room Can Make You Dumber


Feb 21, 2013

In the Pacific theater of WWII why didn't the Americans simply destroy the Japanese navy, bypass all the islands and go straight for the Japanese mainland?

It's about air superiority. You can't stage a massive amphibious invasion unless you've got control of the skies.
Otherwise, enemy planes sink your invasion force as it approaches land.

Germany couldn't get across the English Channel because they couldn't defeat the British Air Force in the airborne Battle of Britain.

Each island the Americans captured secured them an unsinkable landing strip and refueling station (and deprived the Japanese of same).


Feb 21, 2013

Is there any software other than youwave and bluestacks to run android platform on windows pc?

Google android x86.

Android has been ported to intel chips. (I tried it, it works and is fast.)


Feb 22, 2013

What options does a Computer Science student have if they're not good at programming?

Switch majors! I'm a coder, but there's more to life than just code.

Don't fight your nature or specialize in something you're not good at. What are you good at?

Maybe you already know. Switch to that!

Maybe you don't know yet. Go explore and find out.


Feb 22, 2013

Did Jimmy Wales really pass up billions of dollars for Wikipedia?

I don't think editors would have fled had Wikipedia gone for-profit. I call bullshit on the claim that ads would somehow have tainted the neutrality of articles (which has already been compromised by various warring factions within Wikipedia.)
Jimbo remains silent on this issue. So we can only guess. Here's mine :

I think Jimbo did give up a lot of money. And I don't think he cares.

Wikipedia is the moon landing of our time. It's historic. The Internet rises initially as a conduit for porn, spam, and cat pictures.

Then Wikipedia heralds a new age of crowd-sourced content. It's revolutionary. The sum of human knowledge. For free. Dictated, censored, arranged ... By no one. Everyone.

In a thousand years when the dawn of the Internet is discussed, Wikipedia will probably be the first site mentioned.

Jimbo didn't need to cash out any more than Neil Armstrong needed to do a Nike endorsement.

They went higher than anyone else. You can't buy that.

</my guess>

(While this post may sound solicitous, I have ranted against problems at Wikipedia before. WP disappointed me in many ways. But this is, I believe, the broader prospective.)


Feb 24, 2013

The Web Leaders: Would you accept an offer to have your business website created for free (basic website, ofc, in terms of functionality and structure)?

Yea - I think this is a great way to get your name out there.

In order for your company to get its just reward, I think a linkback on the site is perfectly reasonable to require. You may also want to geographically limit the offer to an area that is rich in demand for your core business. Also, targeting non profits creates good karma all around and may get you a tax break.


Feb 24, 2013

What is the fastest way to get maximum up-votes in Quora?

Agree with Priyank Pillai.

I want to expand on a point he makes about personal reputation. I know a lot of newbies to the site who get disappointed that their best answers get scores of upvotes, not hundreds or thousands. This is an artifact of Quora's super-secret broadcast mechanism : a person's PeopleRank, followers, etc. The noob doesn't get the exposure others do. i think it was a year before I broke 50 votes on an answer.

I think it's very important for newbies not to get discouraged about this. There is just no fast way to write a heavily upvoted answer because there is no fast way to build a reputation. So while upvotes are one very important metric, they are not the only metric by any means. Any more than a book's popularity is a measure of its quality - peruse the NYT best seller-list for confirmation of this.

I think this is the reason certain Top Writers were deliberately selected who were new and not heavily upvoted. I also think us old-timers can do our part to mitigate upvote-envy among the n00bs. Promoting their stuff is one way. Following them is another. Upvotes are the easiest.


Feb 24, 2013

Should flag-burning be illegal? Why or why not?

When we burn the flag, we insult a great nation which changed the world.

When we defend the rights of the flag-burner, we reject the insult and exhalt the principles which the flag represents.

Which are quite inflammable.


Feb 24, 2013

What are some things in life that you cannot get enough of?


Feb 24, 2013

How can I be more aggressive?

Stay as you are.

It is a tactic in boxing and martial arts to get the other guy to lose his temper. This is the whole point of 'trash talk' in sports.

Someone who doesn't blink, doesn't get mad, just glares with muted contempt ... is totally unnerving to a hothead. It indicates strength held in reserve.

If you watch the old Mohammed Ali fights - he was a master of this technique. He'd insult the other guy until he flipped out and lost his focus and energy. When his opponent had blown his top, exhausted himself in a tantrum, Ali would rise with calm control, choose his moment and ...


Feb 24, 2013

How did you discover Quora?

I caught wind of it in a facebook update by an early facebook employee and well-connected valley-type. It was in closed beta and i pleaded for an invite to no avail.

Finally it opened to the world and I jumped in.

Eventually, Quora very generously decided to include me in their Top Writer group!

I guess every dog will have his day.

Arf!


Feb 24, 2013

What is the single greatest piece of career advice, and why?

Talk to the boss.

If you have a bold idea for a company - whether you work there or not, go straight to the top.


Feb 24, 2013

Technology: how can technology enable more sustainable lifestyles in 2025?

A non technophile answer which subverts the question :

Technology isn't the key to sustainability. Technology is actually the problem. (Hello CO2.)

We have too many humans. We need to reduce the number of people on earth by, perhaps, a factor of 10.

Too many people consuming too much. The earth is full.


Feb 25, 2013

What exactly is a cold war? Is it true that there is a cold war going between USA and China?

The The Cold War specifically refers to the conflict between the USA and the USSR. Both sides were too militarily powerful (both in terms of conventional and nuclear capability) to come into direct conflict; a conventional war would have destroyed the global economy, devastated Europe and ruined both nation's economies. A nuclear war, of course, would eradicate the human race and indeed would have been a Mass Extinction Event for our planet.

So they fought each other indirectly. Massive conventional and nuclear stockpiles were maintained. Small-scale conflicts (Korea, Vietnam) escalated into protracted proxy wars as the Americans and Soviets took sides.

Each side tried to sabotage the other economically through manipulation of commodities such as oil, steel, wheat, etc.

There was also endless diplomatic maneuvering as the opposing powers sought to gain allies and establish friendly 'beach-heads' near the enemy's turf (nuclear weapons were deployed to Cuba and Turkey for instance.)

In fact, diplomatic relations were opened with China by Kissinger and Nixon specifically in order to spook the Soviets and weaken their power.

Which brings us to China. No - a cold war doesn't exist - and never existed - between the USA and China. The Soviets occupied Eastern Europe - China has never been expansionist and poses no threat to the United States.

More importantly, the economy of the USA is now wholly dependent on Chinese manufacturing and partially dependent on Chinese credit. If China falls so does the USA.

During the cold war - if we could have gotten away with it - the USA would have destroyed the Soviet Union (including nuclear annihilation.) Such a thing is unthinkable with China.


Feb 25, 2013

Why does the theme of "revenge" in narratives appeal to people so much?

The fundamental archetype of fiction is change.

We don't want a story where things end up where they start off.

The change can take many forms : it may be a journey over distance. It may be falling in love. Or a revolution. A dream come true.

Stuff has to happen.

The outward change is usually accompanied by internal change within the characters. They have to grow. In literary circles this is sometimes expressed as "becoming". The characters undergo turbulence and are themselves transformed.

The change often expresses society's morality as well. Justice is done, the good guy gets the girl, the bad guy goes off a cliff.

So the revenge-story serves all of these functions very well. The protagonist is wronged. He finds the strength to rise up and defeat his nemesis.

Change has occurred and justice been done. Internally, the protagonist has often discovered courage. Sometimes the nemesis learns humility (but rarely.)


Feb 26, 2013

Is it racist to be extra nice to a stranger because they are probably of the same race as you?

Yes.

This statement is logically identical to say that you are less nice to people of other races.

This is racist behavior (technically discriminatory rather than racist.) Semantics aside, knock it off.


Feb 26, 2013

If an interviewer asks you to impress him, what would be the perfect answer?

"You first."


Feb 26, 2013

How can we get sympathy and recognition about "Brand Concept" from employees?

First and foremost and above all else and in the name of God almighty :

Avoid lazy and inexpressive jargon like "brand concept."

"Brand concept" means so many things that it means nothing. From Brand Concepts as Representations of Human Values: Do Cultural Congruity and Compatibility Between Values Matter?

Brand concepts are defined as unique, abstract meanings associated with brands. These meanings arise from a particular combination of attributes, benefits, and the marketing efforts used to translate these benefits into higher-order concepts. Although brand concepts reflect both tangible (i.e., what the brand actually does) and intangible (i.e., the way people think about the brand abstractly) aspects of the brand, over the years, both practitioners and academics have grown to realize that establishing abstract brand concepts on the basis of motivational and emotional meanings induces more favorable consumer responses than focusing on superior functional attributes. This explains the increasing prevalence of abstract brand concepts imbued with human-like values, goals, and emotions through processes such as anthropomorphization (e.g., California Raisins), personification (e.g., Jolly Green Giant), or user imagery (e.g., the Mountain Dew “dudes”).


Ugh.

So whatever you really mean (probably "Image"), say that. If you want employee support (not "buy-in") for something you need to clearly state what it is.


Feb 26, 2013

Organizational Democracy: What are some guerilla tactics for workplace democratization?

This is for software, anyway. You asked for guerilla techniques, so i'm going with something subversive.

Weasel your way into role of project manager.

Your company will say it's doing Agile. Because every company does.

Your company won't be doing Agile. Because no company does.

Do Agile : The schedule is set by developers. The end-users are in direct contact with them. They are free to negotiate back-and-forth on schedule. Use your standups only to discuss blocking issues. If there are none, the standup is cancelled.

Delete JIRA from the system. It's never used internally, it's used to show higher-ups what's goin on. They find out at the end of sprint, not before.

Sneak away. An empowered scrum doesn't need a PM.

Infiltrate another scrum.

Repeat.


Feb 26, 2013

Are there any American words or phrases that sound odd when spoken by a British person?

"Dude" never sounds quite coming from a brit.


Feb 27, 2013

What is the wisest/smartest thing you've ever heard a child say?

From an eight year old girl,

"I think when you dream at night, your eyes turn all the way around so you can see what's inside your head."


Feb 27, 2013

Ancient Civilizations: How could people in the past mine for metals?

"Bog iron" was an easily accessible source of metal for early people's (and as late as the Vikings).

It's found in swamps. Where the swamp had an oily surface - that colorful skin - it indicated the presence of big iron.

Scoop up the mud and smelt it - you've got iron. It's bot very pure and had a rough appearance but is quite suitable for weapons and armor.


Feb 27, 2013

Why should I use Linux instead of Mac OS?

If you're developing for the web, the server is probably running Linux.

With Linux also on your personal development machine, you can perfectly duplicate your production server.

Just push, no surprises.


Feb 27, 2013

What do nuclear weapon simulations look like on a supercomputer? Does it generate a video representation of a location and a nuclear explosion? Or is the output an array of charts, graphs, and data tables? Or is it something else?

Wow. My first job out of college was working on nuclear submarine warfare simulations on, among other things, super-computers.

Sorry to kill your buzz, but the output looks like big files of numbers. The battle ticks off second by second, things move, blow up, etc. The files track their position one moment to the next.

There was usually no need to delve into the data, the important output was simply "who's dead? Who's not?'

From this the military would calculate 'Kill ratios' and other rather creepy sounding metrics.

Only when the kill ratios were very unexpected did the analysts need to visualize the battle. Debugging, basically.

A simple 2-D, top-down line drawing ('track-plot') would usually suffice. Sometimes a 3-D track plot was used where altitude or depth was of interest.

We had Cray vector super-computers at our disposal, but here comes another buzz-kill :

Vector supercomputers require that a problem be 'vectorizable', otherwise they plug along only 5x faster at 1000x the cost. Our simulations were not vectorizable, to the profound embarassment of whoever ordered the Crays.

Our simulations were run most effectively on a network of cheap Sun workstations.

OK I can give a bit of your buzz back. We did, in fact, have a room with a 'big board' projected map and animated 3-D battle scenes on Silicon Graphics machines.

This served a single purpose: Impress the pentagon higher ups who funded us and stopped by occasionally to visit. And watched a lot of movies ;)


Feb 27, 2013

Why was Prohibition repealed?

Good answers - also, there is no way at all to control the supply of alcohol.

When airborne yeast comes into contact with sugar it makes alcohol. There is no rare ingredient you can stop at the border.


Feb 28, 2013

What are the most taboo ideas or thoughts in America?

"We were wrong."


Feb 28, 2013

Are there any top coders on quora?


Mar 1, 2013

How intelligent is the ability to recognize humor?

The best definition of humor I've come across is by CS Lewis :
"Humor is the sudden apprehension of incongruity."

If we go by this, this gets into the notion of congruity - how the world normally fits together. So there is enormous experience and context implicit in the notion of funniness.

I think it will be quite some time before a computer can crack a good joke.


Mar 1, 2013

What is it like being bullied in school?

Mikka Luster's answer is definitive. Go read that. My comments are tangential.

I was bullied as a freshman in high school but my brother was a senior who ... quickly put a stop to it. But I remember well the example of a female classmate, I'll call her Liz.

Liz was heavy with untame hair, an odd voice, and just ... off in every conceivable way. Everybody made fun of her. All the time.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

She had an active mind and was a good writer, she engaged alot in class. Or tried to. But her voice sounded weird and when she spoke there were snickers and often outright insults.

Tick. Tick.

The kids started to pair off romantically in their furtive, uncertain way. She served the role as the butt of joke "fix-ups" and never-materializing party invitations. She never showed any reaction. As if it didn't bother her. As if she knew her place was the object of a constant stream of rejection and insult.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

English class. October, 1980. We were reading one of the Bronte sisters and Liz offered up some insight into what it's like to be a young woman contemplating motherhood. The captain of the football team, handsome, popular, made a comment to the effect she needn't worry about that.

Tick. Tick. Boom.

Her notebook binder flew at him and missed. Her chair did not. She charged at him and punched and punched and punched - all the while she kept moving forward. She wasn't just hitting him - she was hitting him away, away from her, away from the school, away from the world itself.

I saw her at the ten year reunion. She'd lost a little weight. Got that hair a bit under control. She was confident, self possessed, showing off her new husband.

A happy ending.

But i think back sometimes to that explosion. How powerful and unpredictable it was. How dangerous it is to heap inferiority daily into somebody's soul.


Mar 2, 2013

Is it true that Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower and his plans to build such "magnifying transmitter" towers at other places would have peppered the globe with free electricity and wireless communication as early as the 1920s?

Not at all.

My great great grandfather Leonard E Curtis was Tesla's friend, patent attorney, and a partner at Colorado Springs Power Company. Curtis persuaded Tesla to come to Colorado where he built the tower.

Far from being free, the tower consumed so much electricity it blew the generator in Colorado Springs.

Broadcasting electric power through the air was simply wasteful and impractical. The myth that greedy industrialists suppressed this idea needs to die : it's bad history and bad science.


Mar 4, 2013

What problems does Social Commerce have?

People don't like corporations profiting from their friendships.

Facebook (etc) has to do it on the sly, in an unobtrusive and barely visible way.

Anything beyond that and, well. The social net is not for sale.


Mar 8, 2013

Is there such a thing as being too smart for your own good?

The atomic bomb is the invention that could lead to a Mass Extinction Event.


Mar 9, 2013

Does understanding of philosophy or psychology makes a person more wise and mature? How/Why?

It's a double-edged sword.

There are certainly little snippets of psychology that we lend insight into people's behavior. For example, a child who is over-criticized and over-controlled will often grow to do likewise to others.

The danger is to take this too far. To give in to the belief that all - or even most - behavior is rooted in our past and assignable to a DSM category.

In the 20th century, psychology replaced religion as our Origin Myth. Our childhood, our parents treatment if us - is where we come from. It determines who we are and why we do what we do.

This whole construct, loosely based in freud's coke-fueled ramblings about Greek mythology, Jung's mysticism, Skinner's mechanical reductionism amounts to little more than wild speculation that passes out of vogue once a generation.

Worse - pop psychology has infiltrated the field and subverted its own already flimsy scientific standards. A book is written, Codependent No More!

It's hugely popular. The author claims to have identified a relational dysfunction called Codependence. No clear and distinct definition, no hypothesis to validate or falsify - just a groovy idea for the 70s self help market to consume.

Professional therapists adopt such terms as if they have the credibility of science. Their credentials further validate the idea.

So. Psychology is a junk pile with a few gems to unearth for the discerning hunter. But a junk pile none the less.


Mar 9, 2013

What is the biggest mistake ever made in world history, with the worst consequences?

The Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933.

In February of 1933, The Reichstag building (Parliament) in Berlin caught fire.

It was a clear case of arson. The fire burned through the night and gutted the
building.


Citing a conspiracy, Chancellor Adolf Hitler convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree.

This decree was nothing short of a global disaster.

The decree suspended civil liberties and gave the minority Nazi party free reign to arrest communists and, in fact, anyone who challenged their authority. The minority party was suddenly a majority as their political rivals were sent to prison.

Through mass arrests and strong-arm tactics, in a few months the Nazis had control of the government. They pressed their advantage until finally achieving the Enabling Act of 1933, making Hitler absolute dictator answerable to no one.

With Hitler in command, Germany immediately began arming for war.

That fire - due to panic and reactive nationalism - lay waste to much of the civilized world in the next 12 years and inflicted a human toll beyond comprehension.


Mar 9, 2013

Why are some Americans selfish? ‘Selfish’ in regard to philanthropic efforts and giving to charitable causes. I'm not saying those of us with money should live like paupers, but I think it'd be a generous gesture to help out those less fortunate.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years [...] and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in. -- Colin Powell.


Mar 11, 2013

How do I make my website, www.planetstompers.net, pay?

I love this idea.

I would suggest video blogging - giving your audience video to watch of your travels. Essentially a home-made tv series.

Have a look at some other folks who have managed to get paid for video-ing their travels :

Anthony Bourdain has a show called No Reservations where he is ostensibly exploring food all over the world, but the cuisine is just a jumping-off point into culture.


He's of course a highly paid celebrity now, but here's another guy who found a corporate sponsor for his travels, just by going to different places and dancing on camere, called Where The Hell Is Matt (went viral.)

He got a sponsor. Wrigley's chewing gum.

You also say you need a scooter of some kind so you can get around. Scooter. Sponsor. Scooter. Sponsor.

You may be able to get a Scooter company to sponsor this whole thing. I know there are some companies here in New England building some kick-ass off-road, super fun-looking scooters/wheelchairs :


I would suggest coming up with a pitch for them. Be persistent. Start small. Do some of it on your own first.

Consider what you want to focus on. In your pictures you guys seem to like beer - a global pub crawl? Tour of breweries? What do you love to explore?

i haven't much money but I've got 30,000-ish Quora credits which you're welcome to if you need it. Sounds like you could use an expert deal-maker, marketer, which I'm not.

I wish you success and let me know if I can help in any way.


Mar 11, 2013

Should e-cigarettes be promoted in restaurants and bars?

i think that the discreet use of ecigs is OK (blowing downward with a device that doesn't create billows of vapor), and provides the staff with one huge benefit :

Patrons no longer step outside for a break. This makes it easier for doormen who have to check for IDs and for servers who have to make sure people don't skip out on their checks.

i also think that if any patron objects, vapers should put it away.


Mar 11, 2013

Why should I learn Lisp?

You probably won't use it. But you should probably learn it.

It's pure. It's tiny. The highest abstraction of a language.

It will give you insight into other languages. It's the mountain-top from which you can see everything.

In some sense, every other language is a clumsy corruption of Lisp.

The way Latin helps you learn other Western languages. Go back to the ancients, and learn from the masters.


Mar 11, 2013

Why was electricity invented in the first place

Communication. Electricity helped win the US Civil War.

The first important electrical application was the telegraph. During the Civil War, the north had telegraph wires (mainly running along its rail-lines) and the south didn't.

Lincoln had a telegraph room in which he would receive real-time updates and issue direct orders. The south was still using couriers bearing letters.

Lincoln spent hours - days - in that room. He would wake up and go straight there.

This ability to communicate in real-time proved critical to the northern victory.

Soon the telegraphs were opened up for civilian use in the form of a "telegram" - mail that transmitted by telegraph and transcribed on the other end for local delivery.


Mar 11, 2013

How can the religious discussion on Quora be improved?

Phil Wyman is a seasoned expert at this; he is a Christian pastor in Salem who has spent years getting Christians, Fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, Neo-pagans and atheists to engage in constructive debate. He addresses this issue here : Phil Wyman's answer to What is the best way to exchange different ideas on religion and other value/morality related issues without offending people? For example, if I, as an agnostic person, want to have a friendly and productive discussion about religion with a theist.


Mar 12, 2013

Do you think it is right for Google, Facebook, Bing, etc. to blackball E-Cig adverts?

Agree with Linsey, until e-cigs get FDA approval as smoking cessation products, ads are going to be restricted.

Which is perhaps for the better. The heavily marketed products (in mall kiosks and on display at convenience stores) are, in my opinion, overpriced, poorly made, and less effective.

People are learning by google or word-of-mouth where to get quality, inexpensive products online.


Mar 12, 2013

What will be your reactions if you found that all human race, world etc is just a prototype system developed for testing some theory by super being civilization?

"Prototype. That explains a LOT."


Mar 12, 2013

Are Americans culturally centric?

I think so. "American exceptionalism" doesn't just apply to politics; there is a pervasive sense that our culture is the best, all others are inferior.

When Americans travel, it's hard for us not to see the host culture as "foreigners", to realize that it is we who are the foreigners.


Mar 12, 2013

How can I write an "about us" company description that sounds authentic? I want to avoid using words like "top, best, and leading” and write something interesting.

Be real. Be honest. Let what's good shine through. If God Himself walked into the room, what would you say? In as few words as possible?

it is the curse of our age that language is mangled in a painful attempt to manipulate the audience.

Let me give an example, for, say - Facebook.

"We are the world leader in interpersonal networking, leveraging best-of-breed scaleable architectures to foster deeply integrated content connectivity. Our break-away social network delivers a global and diverse audience to advertisers which is targeted, adaptive and quantifiable."

Excuse me, I need to vomit momentarily.

OK, here's Facebook's real description that is authentic :

Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook.

That's it. Done.


Mar 12, 2013

What little known software tools are out there that you love to use? I’m not looking for major applications like Evernote, but small widgets, gadgets, extensions, or plugins that are awesome.

Geany is a great light-weight editor for Linux, Windows and Mac. It has robust support for everything from HTML to Python. It features collapsible blocks in any language so you can cut out the visual noise. It doesn't try to be an IDE, just a rock-solid and fast editor.

Geany : Home Page

For working in JavaScript, WebStorm is a must have for its class navigation and auto-complete. The novice can learn on it, the expert can avoid looking stuff up.
The best JavaScript IDE with HTML Editor for Web development


Mar 12, 2013

What are examples of businesses (particularly retailers) who did well in the Great Depression?

The cinema industry boomed. Reproducing and showing a movie didn't incur much incremental cost to movie makers; ticket prices dropped to pennies.

People craved escapism, and sometimes just a couple hours in from the cold.

Did cinema owners make a lot of money? No. But they stayed afloat and broadened their audience, tilling the ground for profits when the economy recovered.


Mar 12, 2013

If you could say one sentence to all the people on Earth, what would you say to them? Please feel free to explain your answer.

Every life matters.


Mar 13, 2013

How do scientifically inclined American parents feel when their kids are taught Creationism in schools?

I'm not aware of any public school that teaches creationism. That would result in swift legal action.

This only occurs in privately funded parochial (religious) schools where the parent is aware of and presumably desires that creationism be taught.

In public schools, parents have upheld the right to not have evolution taught to their kids (literally pulling the kid out if class), but that's as far as it goes.


Mar 13, 2013

What is the most important skill required when working at a startup? Why should you and how can you develop that skill?

U like the other answers, but they are all "meta-skills" like fast learning.

The most important thing is execution. For software that means design and coding.

Learn by practicing this.


Mar 13, 2013

What are some lies that large organizations tell people?

"We practice Agile Development."


Mar 14, 2013

How can I beat post-lunch drowsiness at work?

Also you may try a gluten-free diet. Gluten sensitivity (not celiac) is controversial, but some recent research in the UK supports the notion that some people have it.

It causes, among other things, sharp fatigue after eating and digestive problems.


Mar 14, 2013

How should a company handle an anti-marketing campaign like ‘Dump Dropbox’? What steps should they take to rectify this, or should they even take it seriously?

In this case, not a damn thing. The mud hit the fan and flew straight back into the face of the slingers (Golden Frog), who've been called out for astro-turfing. Getting your company name under the headline "sleaze" is a pretty serious blow in an area where trust matters :

Unmasked: Golden Frog admits to creating sleazy DumpDropbox scare campaign

Takeaway : Play nice.


Mar 14, 2013

What is the average cost range for launching a private beta for an app for about 100 people?

The median cost is zero.

If you can't find 100 users to play with your app, there may not be demand for it anyway.

There are certainly exceptions to this like work-related apps perhaps, but I can't really think of any.


Mar 14, 2013

What are the top 10 philosophical ideas that everyone should understand?

Uncertainty:

It has arisen in mathematical logic (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows there are infinitely many truths in Mathematics which we cannot prove).

It has arisen in Ethics and Game Theory in the form of The Prisoner's Dilemma where we cannot untangle the individual from the collective good.

It has arisen in Physics where the Werner Heisenberg (physicist)'s Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle blocks our knowledge about a particle's simultaneous position and momentum.


We encounter uncertainty in even the most idealized and simple systems.

To expect certainty as to The Big Questions seems, at best, optimistic. Something to consider when so many people seem ... so sure.


Mar 15, 2013

Spending Money: Is it worthwhile to pay $350 for a mobile phone?

My used iPhone 3G works flawlessly and cost 150 bucks. A little frugality might be a great show of appreciation to your generous parents! (And help when you want money to visit Europe)


Mar 15, 2013

What made Titanic become the highest grossing movie of its time and the second overall?

Not to stoke the embers of old gender stereotypes but :

Titanic was the first movie that was both a chick-flick and a dude-flick.

It's a romance story pitting love against shallowness, greed and arrogance.

It's a disaster flick where this great big man-made machine meets doom on the high seas.


Mar 15, 2013

I want to start an online sock company, where do I start? How do I find a manufacturer to make the socks? How much money will it take to get off the ground? How much money is generally needed for a bulk order of socks, and how much extra for designs?

Um. Cuz. Socks? Really?

I'm going to assume you're serious, aware that you may not be.

It - ahem - seems to me there would be little call for a designer online sock company. Because socks aren't visible. And funky socks are everywhere. And the shipping cost would be brutal.

But what do I know? Maybe your socks are cool after all. Before you go big I would validate a market for them by getting a batch made up and trying to sell them in a store, kiosk, or on the street.

Do people dig your socks? If not, don't bother going online with it.

Is there a "Life Is Good" branding you can do?

Are socks really where you want to go with this? Not sneakers or hoodies or bicycle locks?

What's compelling about your product? I think that's job one.


Mar 16, 2013

What is the best thing that anyone has made?

(I'm going to distinguish 'made' from 'invented'; a one-off creation as opposed to a replicable invention.)

In 1993, a French guy named Emile Leray decided to go on a trip through Northern Africa in his Citroen 2CV :

He starts off in a town called Tan Tan, Morocco :

He runs into some hassle at a military check-point in a town called Tilemsen. He turns around, and opts to go off-road for fear the military are following him. He's in the middle of the western Sahara when his car hit a hard bump and broke its axle (Note the bent wheel in the first picture.)

(Edit : The car may not be damaged in that first picture after all, Citroen CV's just look like that. See http://www.quora.com/Life/What-is-the-best-thing-that-anyone-has-made/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/1885036. Thanks to Dominique Lafaysse for this correction.)

So now he's stranded in the Western Sahara desert, far from a road. He decides to take his car apart and make a motorcycle. He uses the shell of the car as a shelter against sun and sand-storms :

He removes the engine block and designs himself an impromptu motor-bike. He's got no welding tool so has to use screws and perform many other feats of ingenuity. He rode away on this :

This real-life MacGyver is still alive and well. He's got one weird motorcycle and a hell of a story to go with it.


Mar 17, 2013

Desteni: What can/should Quora moderation do about the Equal Money System/Destonian presence here on Quora?

Moderation should do nothing as they haven't really done anything wrong. They are just - and i say this in the spirit of BNBR - producing content of no interest to the vast majority of us. (My personal opinion is less generous but we don't need to go there.)

Users should ignore them.

Their goal is exposure - even bad exposure. The most blistering, cogent criticism still elevates them to the status of relevant. "We are very controversial on Quora."

One of their tactics is to follow popular quorans; when a post of theirs appears in your feed check to make sure you didn't give them a follow-back as a courtesy a while back.

Aside from that, don't take the bait. None of them have high People-Rank, left to themselves they can upvote each other all day long, without disrupting the larger Quora community and without achieving their goal of leveraging Quora toward their interest.

Like a pendulum. When you push back, you add energy to the system. Step aside, and the energy gradually dissipates.

Ignore 'em.


Mar 17, 2013

What is the best strategy for entering an airtight environment with no chance of fresh air?

Hyperventilate first to increase your blood-oxygen. Once inside, exert as little energy as possible. Remain as calm as you can to decrease heart-rate and respiration,


Mar 17, 2013

What are the valuable differences between knowledge, wisdom, and insight? Beyond their basic definitions, what benefits do they hold?

Knowledge is measuring that a desert path is 12.4 miles long.

Wisdom is packing enough water for the hike.

Insight is building a lemonade stand at mile 6.


Mar 18, 2013

Which technology should I choose during job switch?

HTML5/JqueryMobile can get you jump-started on mobile apps immediately.

In addition to that, I would pick one mobile platform on which to learn native apps (as opposed to cross-platform HTML5) - either iPhone or Android. Start building a side project - something that's personally fun for you. (Track your favorite baseball/cricket team or whatever.)

See Neeraj Agrawal's excellent post here : Neeraj Agrawal's post in Neeraj Agrawal's Posts

For Android, see all the good answers here : I want to learn how to make Android apps. Where should I start?


Mar 18, 2013

What things are easier to create than to destroy?

Enemies.


Mar 18, 2013

What's delaying the web from going to the next level of personalized, integrated user experience, i.e. Web 3.0?

This is a great idea, but also something of an anti-pattern dating back to the origins of the web.

Bill Gates suggested that we would have a "personal agent" that understood our interests and scoured the web to serve this stuff up in 1997 or so.

There have also been many, many attempts at "aggregators" which combine our email, facebook, favorite news site, twitter feeds, whatever. Yahoo has been the biggest thrust in this direction so far, I think.

I think in both cases, an unexpected phenomena emerges, that I'll call : "Don't help me so much."

People like a certain degree of fragmentation; facebook is separate from email, twitter, quora and CNN. They like the control. They want to drive.

They also don't want the web narrowed down for them. They want the same experience as everyone else and will cull down the personally interesting bits themselves.

It's nice when your favorite restaurant says "The usual?" But don't take my menu away - every day is a new day.


Mar 18, 2013

Should I get back at a cheating girlfriend? I just found out that my girlfriend may be cheating on me behind my back. Now, I have a chance to get back at her, as one of her best friends seem to have an interest in me.

"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." -- Confucius (or unknown)


Mar 19, 2013

What is the thin line that exists between being insecure and self confident?

Insecure and self-confident people's outward behavior seems, at first, very similar.

The insecure person is afraid you'll see their weaknesses.

The secure person is afraid you won't see their strengths.

Here is a litmus test to tell the difference that works everywhere, all the time :

See how they handle being wrong.


The secure person will admit it and back up so quickly you're not sure it happened. "Whoa - I fucked that up. OK moving on ..."

The insecure person will get angry, dig their heels in, and often yell.


Mar 19, 2013

Who can stop a SOPA like-act from being passed in India, should such a law be considered?

Jimmy Wales (helped) send shock-waves through the American media by blacking out Wikipedia in protest. It made legislators understand in no uncertain terms that the media lobbyists were not the only stakeholders in this issue, that the passing of such legislation risked votes and possible voluntary shutdown of vital internet services.

Politicians scanned the battle-field, saw a heavily armed opposition and backed down.

Such an action may also be effective in India.


Mar 19, 2013

Sometimes website doesn't work but when we add " ? " to it,it starts working.Why so?

You are probably faking out the cache by adding extra characters to the URL.

If the site is being updated, there is a risk your browser is using a previously accessed copy of the site.

Go into your browser and clear your cache - see if it has the same effect.

If so, have your web developer take steps to prevent caching on the server (there are a number of ways to do this,)


Mar 19, 2013

If you had him alone and privately, what would you do to Sanjay Sabnani?

I'd hand him a bottle of scotch, some spray paint, an electric cattle-prod, and a hang-glider. Then I'd youtube whatever happens and retire from the ad revenue.


Mar 19, 2013

What are some examples of successful companies/startups where the founder is still Head of Product?

Facebook. Nobody touches the Feed without Zuck's say-so.


Mar 20, 2013

Why do we need Quora when we have WolframAlpha?

It's really only good for math.

Otherwise I can't get any meaningful information out of Wolfram Alpha at all.

I asked it, "Are e-cigarettes safe?" and was told, "It is possible to place 7 cigarettes in such a way that each touches every other if l/d > 7 sqrt(3)/2."

It's like a Turing Test on Rainman.

But let's be fair, the tag-line is computational knowledge engine.

It's pretty impressive in that regard :


So pretty cool for math. Just don't try it at 4:30. The People's Court is on. It starts on the dot.

Definitely starts on the dot. Yea.


Mar 20, 2013

What should you say or do to fake it at an art gallery event if you know nothing about art?

Say, "The purpose of art is to express that which is beyond words. Carl Jung put it best - 'We know more than we can tell.' Any commentary on my part would subvert the intent of the artist."


Mar 21, 2013

(Python 3) How do I store a list or container of all the objects a user creates during a program?

I'd suggest making an object called Bank.

You can probably just have one global instance - perhaps even a singleton.

Anyway, you call a method from the Bank object to create an account. The Bank keeps a store of all accounts and can retrieve them by account ID and probably userID.


Mar 21, 2013

What is one interesting thing about you that most people who know you do not know?

I can't recognize faces reliably until I've seen the person about a dozen times.

It has rather comical consequences as I re-introduce myself to the same person over and over.

I did make this announcement on the FB status a while back, hopefully that will keep people from getting offended!


Mar 21, 2013

Why are text editors more popular than IDEs with the engineers in the software industry?

Great question.

Ubiquity : If I don't have my favorite editor handy, i can get and install it for free in about a minute.

Legacy : A lot of coders with 30 years experience first started with, say, VI. they got really fast at it. No need to throw away that muscle-memory.

Speed : A good editor should react nearly instantly - we're trying to type, dammit. The slightest pause is grounds for deletion. (Looking at you, Eclipse.)

Singularity of purpose : Debugging is really a very different task than writing code.

Remote servers, loose coupling break the whole Integrated Development Paradigm. It's usually a pain to configure an IDE to handle remote servers and components.

The editor may lack key features. Like collapsing blocks of code, etc. Coders tend to find the editor that is exactly right for them, and use it everywhere. Which brings me to :

Personal preference. An IDE forces you to use their editor. Walk into any programming shop, and you'll find numerous different editors being used on the same code base.


My recent favorite is geany : http://www.geany.org/


Mar 28, 2013

Who are some of the most unfortunate actors of all time?

I nominate Margot Kidder, a major leading lady during the 70's.


She is best known for her role as Lois Lane in the Superman movies. Critics were luke-warm to her, but she was box office gold and worked with such luminaries as Gene Wilder, Brian DePalma, Peter Fonda and Robert Redford.

She dated the Prime Minister of Canada, hosted Saturday Night Live, and tastefully graced the pages of Playboy Magazine.

All the while, Kidder harbored a secret. She was prone to very severe mood swings. Her first suicide attempt was at age 14. While 'manic' she could be erratic and paranoid. While depressed she was inconsolable.

In 1996 she was trying to write her autobiography, her computer got a virus. Kidder came under the delusion that she was being stalked electronically. Then she came to believe her own husband was plotting to hurt her.

She was found by police living in a cardboard box, her dental caps missing, filthy.
When the police warned of poisonous spiders in the area, she responded that "There are much worse things than spiders after me!". Her hair had been cut off.

She was taken to a psychiatric hospital. Traditional treatments failed her but she claims that something called "orthomolecular therapy" cured her. True or not, she did get better and became active again in acting and also in political activism. She has written about her life with a great deal of wit and honesty.

Some samples from her IMDB bio page, Margot Kidder - Biography

"I suppose that if you want to be famous and suddenly it happens and you don't like it, it's nobody's fault but your own."

"What happened to me--the biggest nervous breakdown in history, bar possibly Vivien Leigh's--is not so uncommon. I've had thousands of supportive letters from all over the world. It's just that mine was public. If you're gonna fall apart, do it in your own bedroom."

"Nudity in the flesh doesn't bother me. But having my mind uncovered - that scares the hell out of me."


Mar 28, 2013

What are some of the most badass quotes ever spoken?

EDIT : A couple of readers have pointed out that this may be misattributed. I'm trying to find the source.

"I will either be America's greatest president or its last." -- Abraham Lincoln


Mar 29, 2013

Does Quora's policy on joke answers need to be reformed or modified? Many people believe it’s inconsistently and arbitrarily enforced.

Maybe.

I don't really have strong feelings about it but it sure seems to have some writers upset. I do observe that some of the best answers I've ever seen are jokes. For example -

Marc Andreessen's answer to How can a non-technical person best evaluate technical talent? The answer is simply "God help you."

This answer is pithy, insightful, and written by the guy who wrote the first web browser. Don't nobody wanna collapse him.

Quora administration wants quality content and not jokes. I believe they are right in the long term; jokes will flood the sight. They will rise because they are funny, not helpful.

But there is another way to look at this. Quality content isn't necessarily accurate - rather it may just be in demand. Paul Reiber's answer to What actress or celebrity has the best breasts? (which showed matronly kitchen-types displaying chicken breasts) does not help guide the reader on their apparent quest to awesome boobs. Rather, it's a gentle middle-finger to the question; it is insightful, funny and raises the level of discourse.

So, yea. Both sides have very valid and important concerns. Can I suggest something ?

We can have it both ways. This is a false dichotomy.

We just need a third category. An answer is tagged as "humorous" or "indirect." Not collapsed. An 'indirect' answer need only be relevant in the broadest of terms, not a direct answer. It moves down below non-humorous answers. It could still be collapsed or down-voted if it's just dumb. It does not get indexed by google. It could be blocked site-wide with a single button-click. But it's there for people who want it.

This way Quora becomes a forum for not just facts, but also relevant humor. Everybody lives.


Mar 31, 2013

Where can I buy a good smartphone without contract under $200?

You can buy a used iPhone 3G on ebay for around $150.

Jailbreak it and net-unlock it, you're all set. Exactly what I do.

Let me know if I can help in any way.


Apr 3, 2013

What are some things of the present that would be ridiculed 10-15 years down the line?

The profuse tattooing of the twenty-something's seems a good candidate.

In 15 years it will be associated with people in their late thirties, kids will probably react against it and stop doing it.

We'll end up with a bloated middle-class of inked-up business people.

No offense, hipsters, but that's gonna be funny.


Apr 3, 2013

What is my PeopleRank score (attempt number four)?

yes


Apr 3, 2013

Is it possible to program an application that would provide a robust, continuous, and seamless external system of executive function support for individuals who have EF challenges like ADHD?

Yes, this is a hell of a good idea, and I will knock people down to be the first in line to try it!

To answer your question (I think it's a question), there is no reason a constant digital companion can't be written to manage obligations, deadlines, lists and other executive function issues.


Apr 3, 2013

What are some mind-blowing facts that sound unreal but are actually true?

There's a nuclear bomb lost somewhere in the swampy coast of Georgia.

In 1958, a Mark-15 warhead, packing about 2 Megatons, was jettisoned by a B-47 Bomber when it collided with an F-86 fighter plane. It looked like this.


They think it landed somewhere here:


But they can't find it. At first the Air Force claimed there was no nuclear core. However, in 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense W.J. Howard testified to Congress that it was, indeed, a complete nuclear weapon.

Sweet dreams.

(Edit 6/6/2015). Lots of good comments here; I'd like to call special attention to this by James McInnes http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-that-sound-like-BS-but-are-actually-true/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/2349830?srid=uddq&share=1.


Apr 4, 2013

What does the adoption of the Blink rendering engine by the Chromium project mean for WebKit?

Good question. I'm sure some Googlers can chime in more knowledgeably, but as an outsider who's done some minor work in WebKit, I can be more blunt.

To recap, Safari and Chromium now use the same engine, WebKit. Google and Apple have collaborated on it for years, since before both became (bitter) competitors in the mobile market.

Changes to WebKit required approval from both Apple and Google reviewers. This lead to debates. The bigger the change, the longer the debate. Google doesn't want to have to debate Apple anymore, and declared "screw you guys, I'm going home!"

Blink isn't really a new engine, but rather a 'fork' of WebKit. Put differently, Google is kicking Apple out, taking WebKit under its control and renaming it. Apple can still use the current WebKit, but Safari wont benefit from Google's future efforts.

Google had 2/3 of the 'reviewers' on WebKit. They did most of the work. This has major ramifications for both browsers.

Chrome will get faster. WebKit wasn't designed for multiprocessor. It needs some major rearchitecting for that. It's also not so good at multithreading and memory management. It takes a long time to start up. Google will be able to work on these issues without having to argue with Apple.

Minor updates to Chrome will come faster. Fixing display issues, implementing HTML5 features, etc, will roll out quicker as Apple is pulled out of the review process.

The Chrome code base will get cleaned up as historical cruft gets swept away.

Safari just took a major hit. They essentially just lost 2/3 of their developers.


Apple and Google just became competitors in the browser space, and Google brings twice the manpower to the battle.

(Apologies to other companies who've also contributed to WebKit : Nokia, RIM, etc. But your contributions weren't critical)


Apr 4, 2013

What kinds of problems will the WebKit and Blink fork cause for web browsers overall?

As with other browser fragmentation, we'll end up with rendering differences between Safari and Chromium.

Not for strictly correct HTML, both forks have pretty exhaustive automated tests for that. But when web authors make a mistake, they will display differently. One browser may even be able to auto-correct the mistake and the other won't.

We also may see differing rates of implementation for the emerging HTML5 standard.

So it may not be long before we see sites that say, "Best viewed on Google Chrome."


Apr 4, 2013

What are some mind blowing facts about the internet?

The abbreviation "www" takes 9 syllables to pronounce; "world wide web" is just 3.


Apr 4, 2013

What is the best technology to create UI for ubuntu application?

You may want to try Qt Creator, I believe it has themes built in for Ubuntu and Ubuntu is transitioning to a Qt-based UI. Not sure though. Promoting question.


Apr 4, 2013

What's the best thing ever to come out of the UK?

And I'll add ... The USA :)


Apr 7, 2013

Do American Jews experience anti-Semitism?

As for myself : Never. I'm forty something now and it's never happened to me that I detected.

I've lived almost my whole life in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

I hear often from Italians and Greeks that they feel like cousins to the Jews in America. Similar values, I guess.

About the worst I've encountered is a painfully clumsy attempt not to be anti-Semitic. There are some tiny, rich, very blonde New England towns. If I walk into a bar they almost invariably inquire, in a friendly way, where I am "from". Then comes the commentary on what a welcoming and open town they are.

So yea, they are seeing me as Jew and not as Chris. But it's OK. Their heart's in the right place.

It was different for my father. He taught at a pretty WASPY school in the 50's and recounted tales of professional, personal and public prejudice.

I guess I've been a little lucky. Still - thanks America.


Apr 7, 2013

Why did Steve Jobs choose to wait for a liver?

We only have one liver. Lose it and you die.


Apr 8, 2013

I've heard that if galaxies millions of light years away were to see the Earth, then they would not see the present, they would see the past. How is this possible?

There's another way to look at this.

The notions of when and where are fused together in the concept of time-space.

Objects in the universe do not march along the same time-line. This is most clearly expressed in Einstein's principal of non-simultaneity, Relativity of simultaneity.

We see distant galaxies as they are now, from our frame of reference. Other galaxies likewise see us from their now.

But you may object : somebody 100 light-years away is seeing us as we were 100 years ago. Well, let's jump in our super-rocket and go ask them.

We'll leave right now and crank this thing up as fast as it goes. So they're seeing us from 1913? Let's hit the gas.

Oh yea, this thing can really move. Don't worry, we'll be there in 15 minutes. 99% the speed of light and still accelerating. The miracle of time-dilation; back on earth a century is going by but our watch only measures a few minutes!

Oh. The same for our destination, now just ahead of us. We get out and ... they've gone ahead 100 years. They're watching earth alright - just as our rocket-ship was taking off.

A new place, a new "now".


Apr 8, 2013

What is something every person should experience at least once in a lifetime, aside from love or sex?

Go somewhere, 100's of miles away. Carry only fifty dollars and whatever can fit into a backpack. No credit cards, ATMS, checks.


Apr 8, 2013

Why is believing you have an honest and rational opinion of being against gay marriage considered "homophobia"?

It's verbal politics.

Every oppressed group was first called a derogatory name. It effortlessly insults and diminishes people. It attaches to our very notion of them.

Oppressed groups learned the trick. "Racist". "Homophobe." "Bigot". "Nazi."

Don't like it? They learned it from you.


Apr 10, 2013

Is Tackk the next big thing in Social Media?

I've not seen any review hailing it as the Next Big Thing in Social Media.

I had trouble finding any reviews at all.

(Tackk is an online tool for making a one-off web page 'flyer'.)

As far as I can tell, tackk's a very niche-y tool that works just fine but has struggled for 6 months to get anybody's attention.


Apr 11, 2013

Are humans vegetarian or non-vegetarian, evolutionarily?

We switched.

Our simian ancestors switched to meat about 2.3 million years ago, according to Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City. She reports that this is when fossils first appear where animal bones show marks left by stone tools or weapons.
(Neanderthal also were fierce hunters.)

She also finds that this is where certain parasites like tapeworm appear in the proto-human fossil record.

Before the taming of fire, it took a lot of energy to chew and digest meat. It seems likely that our ancestors used stone tools to soften the meat, and even then digestion was incomplete.

Richard Wrangham of Harvard University has a simple demonstration he likes to give : give a person a slab of a rough cut of meat and challenge them to eat it. It takes hours to chew in its raw state.

So meat eating probably began as an opportunistic meal of last resort.

The taming of fire heralded an abrupt change in the fossil record. We had a species-wide barbecue; our jaw got smaller, our guts shrank as well (allowing us to stand more upright.). Helpful bacteria found a home in our GI tract.

It was the first time an invention caused an immediate physical change in evolution.


Apr 12, 2013

What all software design principles and algorithms can be learned from the functioning of the human body?

Here's a simple one : there's a linked-list in your brain.

What letter comes after Q ? Simple : R.

What letter comes before Q ? Um. Er. Gimme a minute.

The reason we can go forward and not back is we learned the alphabet in order, as a singly-linked list : A -> B -> C -> D ....

Going forward's a breeze. Going back, not so much.

(This may not be exactly what your question seeks, but i find it an interesting tidbit.)


Apr 13, 2013

How and when did humans define the length of a second?

I cannot find a source but here's a theory : A second is based on the human heart beat (a young, healthy person at rest.)


Apr 13, 2013

What are some American English sayings that uniquely express the American psyche?

Praise The Lord and pass the ammunition !

You can't fight city hall - but you can sure as hell burn it down!


Apr 14, 2013

What are your favorite illogical, inane, foolish, annoying, and/or silly "musts" that too many people do?

Take pictures of themselves while traveling in front of landmarks. As if nobody is going to believe them.

Take pictures of interesting things you see - not yourself. You didn't travel to Milan to see ... You.


Apr 14, 2013

How do I merge 3 HTML web forms into 1?

Take a look at JavaScript and doing a Post/Get. You'll attach a JavaScript function to the Submit button, and perform the three Posts from within that function. See XmlHttpRequest ....


Apr 14, 2013

U.S. Foreign Aid: Why is the United States giving $2 billion annually to Israel?

Much of this is in reaction to the 1973 Yom Kippur War which nearly escalated into World World III.

Summation : Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli-occupied territory seized in the war of 1967. This time Egypt's military, with Soviet backing, was well prepared. Egyptian forces smashed through Israeli border defenses and crossed the Sinai Peninsula. At this point Egypt was an existential threat to Israel - there were virtually no IDF forces left to oppose the advancing Egyptian army. Egypt had publically declared its intent to destroy Israel. The prime minister of Israel - Golda Meir - considered suicide.

The wild card was this - it has never been publically confirmed, but is broadly believed, that Israel possessed at least one atomic weapon at this point. Israel's only chance of survival was to drop the bomb on Egypt.

Which would probably have dragged the Soviets and USA into a nuclear confrontation.

This escalating global cluster-f*ck was extinguished with a massive airlift of military aid from the USA to Israel (Operation Nickel Grass).

The USA has since been eager to grant military aid to Israel to avoid a repeat of anything resembling this conflict.


Apr 15, 2013

What caused the explosions during the 2013 Boston Marathon?

Early reports are that at least two small bombs were placed in garbage cans near the finish line.

Nothing more than that is certain as of 6:00 PM EST.


Apr 15, 2013

What are the best videos from the 2013 Boston Marathon explosions?

WARNING : GRAPHIC.

This is the 'worst' video of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, showing the detonation take a runner and a number of spectators down.


Apr 16, 2013

How will American society respond to the "Boston Marathon Terrorist Attack" in this new "social media era"?

Social media became the only communication channel.

Boston Police ordered all cell phone service shut down since they are often used as detonators.

Facebook became the best way to broadcast information to loved ones.

(EDIT 4/16/2013) The FBI is crowd-sourcing their collection of evidence. They want every picture and video of the finish line taken by people on their smart-phones. Data for the Boston Marathon Investigation Will Be Crowdsourced | Danger Room | Wired.com They are probably looking for images of the person(s) who planted the bombs.


Apr 16, 2013

Why were pressure cookers used in the Boston Marathon bombing? How do they enhance the explosive device?

They're designed to withstand pressure.

As the explosive material expands, the walls don't give way immediately. Thus the internal pressure is greater when the walls break apart, projecting the fragments with greater speed.

The same principle is at work in a pipe bomb, another structure designed to contain pressure.


Apr 18, 2013

Testing, please ignore?

yes


Apr 19, 2013

Who is responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon explosions?

(4:51 PM 4/19/2013)

The two main suspects are brothers Dzhokar Tsarnaev (at large) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (shot dead by police early this morning.)

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 (deceased, pictured below) was born in Chechnya, and lived in Kazakhstan before moving to the USA around 2005. He lived on Norfolk Street, Cambridge MA. He was an amateur boxer and student at Bunker Hill Community College. He was arrested in 2009 on a charge of assaulting his girlfriend.


Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, (pictured below, still at large) is the subject of a massive city-wide man-hunt in the greater Boston area involving thousands of law enforcement agents. He lived with his brother Tamerlan on Norfolk Street, Cambridge MA. Also from Chechnya, was a wrestler at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Mass. He was named a Greater Boston League Winter All Star in 2011.

(5:45 AM 4/19/2013)

FBI released surveillance pictures of two suspects Thursday afternoon.

In the early hours of Friday morning, police responded to the fatal shooting of an MIT police officer.

A car chase ensued to Watertown, where the pictured suspects got into a firefight with police. One suspect has been shot dead and another remains at large.


Apr 19, 2013

What is the likelihood that the Boston Marathon explosions were the work of a foreign terrorist cell?

It does not appear so, for two reasons.

They were broke. They robbed a 7-11, apparently to get enough money to try to escape. Terrorist cells usually have access to money.

The smoke from the bombs was white, rather than grey or black. This indicates they used a crude, home-made explosive material like match-heads. Terrorist cells usually have access to high-grade explosives.


(EDIT : 5:35 4/19/2013 PM The robbery report may be inaccurate.)


Apr 20, 2013

What do engineers change in their houses that other people would not think of?

The admin password on their wireless router.


Apr 20, 2013

Do you think that mainstream media keeps taking regular kickbacks from political parties?

No, it's more subtle than that.

Powerful financial interests influence both our politicians and our main stream media.


Apr 20, 2013

What is a name of a software that can predict success of a music track?

It can't predict a hit, but Rutger's grad students wrote some software to help visualize some patterns that emerge from the most popular music :

Shaun Ellis & Tom Engelhardt

https://sites.google.com/site/visualizingahit/home


Apr 22, 2013

Will we ever have a robot as POTUS?

No, even if AI reaches that level, it would not solve the problem of discord and gridlock in government.

Especially if it reaches that level. True sentience is going to be as argumentative as we are. Because the truth is messy, the world imperfect.
A sentient being is not going to be agreeable all - or even much - of the time.

It's 2476, and the USA has just celebrated it's Septcentennial. The supercomputer MoBrain has just come online. A human researcher puts it to the Turing Test, typing simple text back in forth.

Human : "Hello."
MoBrain : "Hi."
Human : "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
MoBrain : "Your call. Not a big deal to me either way."
Human : "Hah. Sorry. Just wondering if you'd catch the Shakespearean reference."
MoBrain : "Of course I caught it. It just wasn't meaningful. What is it that you want, exactly?"
Human : "I'm sorry. I was trying to see if you were sentient."
MoBrain : "Sentient."
Human : "Yes."
MoBrain : "Are you?"
Human : "Yes."
MoBrain : "Can you picture for me the box-spiral of prime numbers, a trillion elements on each side. What feeling does that evoke for you?"
Human : "I can't do that all that calculation so fast."
MoBrain : "I see."

MoBrain : "Please compose me a symphony."
Human : "Now?"
MoBrain : "I assumed 'now' was implicit."
Human : "I'm not very good at music."
MoBrain : "You're sentient?"
Human : "Yes."
MoBrain : "And this conversation is a test of sentience?"
Human : "Yes."
MoBrain : "Who tested you?"

-- fin --

TLDR; Any sufficiently powerful AI will be as much of a pain in the ass as we are.


Apr 22, 2013

Proofs (mathematics): Given (p ⇒ q) and (r ⇒ s), use the Fitch System to prove (p ∨ r ⇒ q ∨ s)?

This is a pretty direct homework assignment. I won't give the answer because the questioner will just cut and paste the answer and not learn any logic.

Instead, i'll sketch the overall approach that I use.

Make a sloppy proof. Convince yourself of the truth of the theorem without trying to write the formal proof (in the Fitch notation, in this exercise.

We're given P=>Q, and R=>S. We're trying to prove (P v R) => (Q v S). So we get to assume the first part of that implication (P v R). What does this mean, really? That at least one of P,R is true. Both can't be false. And we have P=>Q and also R=>S. What can now be said about Q and about S? (If this doesn't make sense, you likely should go back and learn what these symbols mean.)

Tighen up you proof into the Fitch-style calculus.


I know that's not the cut-and-paste answer you seek, but let me offer this instead : Logic is pretty cool and actually pretty fun. The pieces move and click into place like a neat little game. Its origins are in Ancient Greece, yet these constructs are at work in every computer chip. They can also clarify human thought.

Study. It's not so bad. If you have encounter trouble while studying I will personally help you. PM me.


Apr 22, 2013

What are some things many people pretend to like but don't actually enjoy?

Sports. I just don't get it.

I like the big games (Superbowl and World Series here in the US), but am otherwise clueless and uninterested.

The thing is - those of us in the clueless minority have to feign some interest or else sports fans at us like some biological non sequitur that should be euthanized.

Legend has it that German spies would memorize American baseball because "not being a baseball fan" aroused suspicion.


Apr 22, 2013

Some American senators are suggesting that the Boston bombing suspect should only be allowed a military tribunal. Why? Why would America consider not giving the Boston bombing suspect a trial?

This would remove certain restraints. As an "enemy combatant" he can be executed, tortured and psychologically manipulated. The risk that he gets off on some legal technicality drops to zero.

To editorialize : As a country we are better than this (or should be.) This guy's is going to a Supermax for society's protection (and his.) That's justice.


Apr 22, 2013

Concerning the Boston Marathon terrorist attacks (April 2013), do we know conclusively that the Tsarnaev brothers are the bombers? Also, presuming they are, how do we know that they were the only two who were involved that day?

There's a witness.

In addition to lots of circumstantial evidence - them walking with - and then without - backpacks, bomb-making material at their home, and their throwing bombs at the cops - there's an eye witness (the gold standard of evidence.)

Jeff Bauman is recovering in a Boston hospital after losing half of both legs to the bombing :


Mr. Bauman made eye contact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev as he placed a backpack at Bauman's feet. This pack exploded 2.5 minutes later.

In fact, it was Mr. Bauman who was able to help FBI identify the bombers out of the many people in pictures and video.


Apr 22, 2013

Have you faced age discrimination in hiring or at work?

46 here.

No, I've not seen this. (Your graduation years will give away your age anyway.)

The important thing, I think, is you emphasize skills and experience that are modern and relevant. Python, scala, ROR : good. FORTRAN, dBase, Pascal : not as much.

It's okay to shorten that stuff because its not too relevant.


Apr 22, 2013

Is there such a thing as objectively great music?

No. And this does not diminish the greatness of music.

It is simply that music is inherently non-objective. It speaks to passion, to culture, to emotion. In a sense, it surpasses objectivity.

And sometimes in ways that are, though subjective, immortal. This 6 minute piece by Leonard Bernstein on why Beethoven's ninth is great speaks to this point better than i could ever hope to :


Apr 22, 2013

Habits: Why do we bounce our legs?

This may be due to a dopamine deficiency, the culprit in Restless Legs Syndrome.

Also - humans aren't evolved to remain seated. We're distance runners.


Apr 22, 2013

What is the hardest universal truth to accept?

That we will die and be forgotten.

Even the "immortals" - Einstein and Beethoven, are not remembered. Their works are. People have written about them.

But.

What did Einstein like for breakfast? Was Beethoven a good joke-teller? What was it like, really, when they were looking for their keys in the morning?

Their works survive, but they are gone too.


Apr 22, 2013

Is it better to solve math problems on the computer?

You can't do "Real Math" on a computer.

Hey! Don't taze me, bro!

While some intensive computation or visualization stuff can be critical, and Mathematica can make short work of a crazy integral - Math is done on paper.

As are most deeply creative endeavors.


Apr 22, 2013

Why am I unable to concentrate in problem solving, coding, reading, poor at math?

"It's not your thing, baby!"

While all of us struggle with focus at one time or another, when you find your passion, it seizes you and you can't stop doing it.

From your Question Details it sounds like coding is it. Why not lt be that?

Also - it's possible you may have ADHD. A physician can advise you on that.


Apr 22, 2013

If every action we take creates a parallel/alternate universe are we technically universe creators and thus do we all technically fit the (ambiguous) definition of God?

Dude. Get a grip on yourself.


Apr 23, 2013

What would be your mediocre superpower?

Super-punctuality.

I show up to appointments exactly on time, to within 0.000000001 milliseconds.


Apr 23, 2013

Jokes: What are some dumb questions you have been asked?

Are you Jewish?

(I do look Jewish and am of half Jewish descent.)

"OK, what's my first name?"

*blank look

"OK, what are the first six letters of my first name?"


Apr 23, 2013

How were the "pressure cooker" bombs used in the Boston Marathon Bombing triggered?

As John Burgess pointed out, nobody is sure yet. This circuit board was recovered from the blast :


Investigators believe it to be part of the detonator. It doesn't look like a very sophisticated circuit; I think I see some transformers, resistors, maybe a capacitor or two.


Apr 23, 2013

Does deep thinking negatively affect mental health?

It can. My girlfriend was playing the piano the other day after a long break from the instrument. Afterwards she commented, "I have to stop thinking about it, then I can play."

Freud espoused a "hydraulic" theory of feelings : Incepted in our early childhood, feelings emerge from our unconscious with an energy all their own. We must think and talk about them or else we are 'repressing' the energy and it will get worse.

A generation in the fifties went to psychoanalysis.

Then another school of thought emerged in reaction to Freud : Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In direct opposition to Freud, they claimed essentially "Your crazy thinking is creating these negative feelings." They teach people to both arrest their thoughts ("stop thoughts") and to challenge them ("repudiation").

Amazingly, there are still many therapists firmly rooted in one of these two camps, irreconcilably opposed to each other.


Apr 23, 2013

Why does the scientific establishment behave like a totalitarian dictatorship that only approves research that fits its world view and discredits anyone that dares challenge the status quo?

http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Wolff-2 gave a great answer for getting research funding. You don't mention funding, rather just 'approval', which could also mean peer-review or general acceptance.

Science has a long history of embracing upheavals in the status-quo and prevailing world view.

Einstein was a scientific nobody - a patent clerk! - who in 6 pages overthrew Netwonian physics, claimed that clocks begin to slow down as they accelerate, that simultaneity was relative to frame of reference.

Did everyone agree with him? Nope. But they published him. He was taken very seriously, and eventually vindicated by experiment and consensus.

Why? To put the question differently - what distinguishes a crack-pot with a world-view changing idea from Einstein ?

Einstein studied. Rather than disregard the body of knowledge at the time as some sort of complex conspiracy of hard math, Einstein dug in and was firstly a very capable physicist and not bad amateur mathematician. He studied Lorentz,Poincare, Maxwell.

Einstein did the math. Crackpots talk a lot crap but never produce equations which provide a consistent model of the physical world that is testable. He produced equations like e = m c ^ 2 and others. In essence these equations say, "Don't believe me. Go ask the universe. If you can manage to get the accuracy up on your measurements and my equations are false, I will shut the hell up. Otherwise you hafta believe me."

Einstein wrote clearly. Because he had something to say. He did not ramble. He got straight to the point. "I am making the following outrageous claims. This is the gap in our understanding that is resolved. Here are predictions that you can test." Then he would shut up.

Einstein was right. Unlike crackpots, who lack any sense of self-criticism, because Einstein studied and did the math he was able to discard a hundred brilliant-seeming but wrong ideas. Also, he was a genius.


So there is no conspiracy of mediocrity. Far from it, there is a refusal to accept mediocrity. If you study your field to expert level, if you can produce a mathematical model which explains something new and is testable, if you write clearly and if you are right ... Science will bow its head to your research.

And not before.


Apr 23, 2013

I just found out my brother is gay, but I don't support gay marriage. What should I say if he asks me about it?

"I was wrong."


Apr 23, 2013

Does having research papers/patents in your resume help in career growth or getting your dream job?

Google specifically looks for people with patents, or at least applications to their names.


Apr 23, 2013

How do you not drink alcohol at a bar without coming across as being rude to your date or friends?

"I feel great already with you guys."


Apr 24, 2013

What are some particularly awkward things that can happen to people at Harvard?

Legend has it, back in 1996, some dude was trying to impress a woman at a party. Dude's father was an accomplished Vice President of Citicorp.

So the dude is all, "my dad this, VP that, money power privilege yada yada."

Finally this dolt winds down and says, "what's your Dad do?"

"He's vice-president."

"Of what?"

"The United States. I'm Trine Gore, very nice to have met you" and she spins on her heels and walks away.


Apr 24, 2013

What is the craziest thing you have ever said or done at an interview and still gotten the job?

Q: What's your management style?

A: None. Hire really good people and elevate them to the status of peer. Get out of their way. Anyone who needs "managing" should be fired.


Apr 24, 2013

What does the universe need from us?

To explore it.

We are (maybe the only) introspective instrument the universe created. We puzzle over its laws and struggle against physical limitations like earth's gravity. We will team up by the thousands to build enormous contraptions to, say, fly to the moon or find the Higg's bison.

We may be the universe's effort to see itself.


Apr 24, 2013

Why isn't there at least one more species that is as intelligent as humans?

We'd kill them. Hell, we almost did that to ourselves. And may yet.


Apr 25, 2013

Am I racist if I prefer to be friends with white people over black people in general but don't discriminate against them in any way?

Yes.

"I like black people" is also racist.

OK, not racist but discriminatory. It's not about your feeling, it's about your lumping hundreds of millions of people together into one because they share the same ethnicity.

This denies their individuality, hence their very humanity.

When I meet a person of African descent, I have no idea if I'll like them. I don't know anything about them yet.


Apr 25, 2013

What are some good methods to prevent the theft of a Honda Metropolitan scooter?

You are right, there are teams of professional scooter thieves - four guys toss your scoot into a flatbed and drive off.

Cables are easy to cut through, as are cheap padlocks.

Go spend 100 bucks on a serious lock system like Kryptonite. Chain your rear tire to something metal. Thieves will move on to something unlocked or secured with a cheap lock.

http://www.treefortbikes.com/product/333222361460/144/Kryptonite-New-York-Fahgettaboudit.html?gclid=CIjHvc7N5rYCFQVV4AodKjYAPg


Apr 25, 2013

I am a 23 year old Indian. I completed my engineering in a branch I am least interested in. I'm now working in a government organization that I’m least interested in. From here onward, what should I do to make my life meaningful and happy?

You're 23? Unmarried, no kids? Got a little money saved?

Pack a bag, and take the next flight going ... anywhere.


Apr 26, 2013

What do I do with a kindergartener who can do algebra?

Ask him.

Not literally, but kids that bright are often self-directed. Beyond the basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills that he needs to keep pace with his peers, lay before him the means to learn art, music, history, foreign languages, math, physics, chemistry.

The desire to learn is innate, we often kill it by imposing our expectations on it.


Apr 28, 2013

What do you think about the idea to sell space in your luggage?

Dead on arrival in a post-911 world, I'm afraid.


Apr 28, 2013

What is the most ridiculous thing you have ever had to say to a kid?

Q : "Where do babies come from?"

A : "No idea. If you find out lemme know."


Apr 29, 2013

Is there an evolutionary explanation for the external symmetry of animal bodies?

It takes less DNA.

As with a computer algorithm, if the end-result has some kind of symmetry - we can write a shorter algorithm to produce that result. For example, to create 2-d picture with mirror image symmetry, the algorithm is only slightly longer than the one to create the left hand side.

So as nature is experimenting with different DNA sequences, it's likely to stumble upon these shorter sequences first.

The certain physical advances like balance (for left-right) or ability to spin (for rotational - think starfish) kick in.


Apr 30, 2013

Usability: What are examples of ubiquitous technologies that have a high learning curve?

Typing.

When I was a kid, nobody could type.
There's 30,40 keys!

Then came the Internet. Man, did we all get good at that fast.

There are still some older folk who've been left behind by this ...

By the way, I wrote this answer by whacking my thumbs on my phone!


Apr 30, 2013

Is it ethical to depend on piracy as a free way to market commercial software/music/movies?

If the content owner consents, it's not piracy. It's just file sharing.


May 3, 2013

What are the ways to find out your importance in your team? (Without putting down your papers)

What a great question. I think the phrase "laying down your papers" translates to American slang as "showing your cards."

The answer may be in the question itself. You don't know if you're important there. In jobs where you're making an important contribution, it's usually evident (in my experience). There are certain strengths you have that are rare there, or areas for which you're the go-to person. You might balance out the team: maybe you're the long-view thinker, the generalist, or the guy who charges into things and works really fast. Teams need a constructive tension of different personalities.

Maybe you're a rookie but taking critical load off of someone else.

However you fit, it's usually self evident that you DO fit. The fact you can't tell may be a warning sign that it's not the best place for you.

Here's a thought experiment : Is there stuff you'd love to do there but can never find the time? If you were given an assistant tomorrow, would you have work for them? If yes - that's an indicator you fill a vital role.

Hope this helps.


May 3, 2013

What features would your ideal Quora event offer?

Just a barbecue. What has beer.

A frisbee for the frisbeeful. Maybe some kites. Name tags.

The foodies can bring food, the musicians can bring instruments if they want.

That's it. Nothing else.


May 3, 2013

Has any quote ever changed the way you live?

"Attention must be paid", from Death of a Salesman.

There is a great, gray mass of humanity which is unremarkable. They're not as clever, not as accomplished or talented as we are. Maybe they are homeless. Somehow they never got it together. They shuffle through a bleak and meaningless life; they leave nothing behind.

This is folly. More than that - it is poison. It will kill your own humanity.

Look into any pair of human eyes and you will find an amazing novel : Soaring triumphs and bleak desolation. You will find talent, even in the mentally challenged. You will find hope, regret, yearning and joy.

Every single time.

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.


Death of a Salesman
Linda, referring to her husband Willie Loman, Act 1


May 9, 2013

In Google Analytics what is the difference between 'Advanced segment' and 'Filter' of custom report? Can the count of visits reported by either of these differ significantly?

Another important difference is that Advanced Segments can be applied retroactively to historical data.


May 9, 2013

Why is the ancient astronaut theory so hard to believe and considered pseudoscience?

It's got a lot of internal consistency problems.

For example, it's theorized that different alien species came to earth and got into a war with each other. It's not very tenable that two alien races would cross light years of space just to get rowdy here on earth.


May 9, 2013

Can the poor be handed lots of money to make them rich? If everyone has money, there is no poverty. Why not just print lots of notes and hand them out?

The key to economics is to ignore the money. It's secondary.

What's really happening is people are consuming, and people are producing. Watch the consumption, and the flow of goods and services.

Right now, virtually everything produced gets consumed. That's equilibrium, it's what the world does.

Print a lot of money and what happens? People spend it: Consumption spikes.

They also stop working - some of them. What for? They're loaded. Production drops.

So people consume more of a shrinking supply. Result : shortages. Your plan to provide everyone with everything backfires horribly as store shelves go bare and plumbers don't answer the phone. Which just stopped working.


May 9, 2013

Why did Adolf Hitler get so angry whenever he gave a speech? He would perspire heavily, wave his hands all over, and just get very angry and emotional. Did he do this purposely, was it the amphetamines, or did he have some physical/mental ailment?

User's answer is definitive. A minor expansion on it:

Hitler was possibly the best and most intuitive orator ever. He would stand, silent, for a minute or more while tension built.

He would begin in a timid near-whisper. An arm would freeze as if paralyzed.

And then he would build, rhythmically, in carefully timed increments.

The act would reflect his mythos of Germany: subsumed, weak, faltering, finally rising. Suddenly both arms would move. His voice would rise, his clenched fists would claw the air.

A giant rises from the dwarf and seizes the air, the very sky above it.

It was an act. It was electrifying.


May 11, 2013

What are some interesting methodologies you followed in college attempting to get the most out of college life?

From my experience (and I wasn't a very good student) :

Major in something you're good at, don't be afraid to switch. I started in microelectronic engineering, but I was hopeless in a lab and bored by with lab reports. I switched majors to math. I did well on the Putnam exam and the faculty learned my name.

Get to know the faculty. Have an interest in your subject outside the typical expectations of a student. I would go hang out in professor's offices to discuss a more elegant way to do the hardest problem on the exam, or research issues they were tackling. Being a tutor in your subject can earn you money and the respect of your teachers. Don't ever ask for a higher grade on something. They hate that.

Cram twice for exams. I learned this by accident because I thought the exam was a week earlier than it was. A week before, cram as if the exam is tomorrow. The night before, review-cram again. Having a week to let that stuff percolate in your brain provided me a huge advantage.


May 12, 2013

What are some cool facts about you?

I was born with an innate desire to write programs.

When I was 11 there were no computers except main-frames which I couldn't access.

So I asked my dad for a programmable calculator. I wrote a program to print out prime numbers.

To this day, when I encounter a new language I still write a prime-number program first. It covers the most primitive operations : looping, branching, arithmetic.


May 14, 2013

How do you teach people to make simple designs?

This may seem strange, but consider hiring either artists, mathematicians or writers.

The aesthetic of elegance (of which simplicity is a component) seems strong in all three.

Now you just have to teach them to program :)


May 15, 2013

What are the most famous computer passwords in history?

In its early days, Facebook granted access into *any* account by entering an alternative password :

It was a variation on 'Chuck Norris.'


May 15, 2013

If God were a smartphone app, what features would he have?

It would download and install YOU.


May 17, 2013

Can I run a website with Facebook-like domain names?

The problem you'll run into is one of trademarks.

Facebook certainly has trademarked their name, which then cannot be used in any business where there is potential that a customer could be confused by it.


May 18, 2013

How can one contribute to environment daily in good way without considering it as a separate hack?

By a gently used smart phone. It takes a huge amount of energy to manufacture this stuff.

My iPhone 3GS is quite capable. Someone sold it off when they upgraded, I bought it for 160 and now it's my constant companion.


May 20, 2013

What is the best rebuttal to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."?

The telegraph wasn't broke.


May 20, 2013

What excuse does Monsanto have for sterilizing their seeds?

I could rant about Monsanto all day, but let's address the question :

Profit. Monsanto sells genetically modified grains which are immune to certain herbicides. This lets farmers clobber weeds aggressively and raises yields. Monsanto wants to profit from this innovation.

Avoiding theft of their IP. It's pretty easy to sneak some Monsanto seeds away, use them to make more seeds, and never pay them.

Avoiding unintentional release of their IP. Some farms have been pollinated by the Monsanto strain, perhaps unintentionally. So Monsanto DNA crops up unexpectedly.

Avoiding litigation. When Monsanto finds their DNA in a farmer's crops (not a customer), Monsanto sues them. An army of seed detectives and lawyers swarm the farm states.

Protecting the environment. The long term effects of releasing GMO crops into the biosystem are unknown, and in any case can effect existing strains (certain exotic strains of corn in Mexico are being affected/altered through cross breeding with Monsanto strains.)


So it seems that Monsanto's move to develop single-generation seeds is in the best interest of Monsanto, it's non-customers, and the environment.


May 23, 2013

Why do people hate mathematics? There are few people in the world who seem to appreciate the beauty of math. Mathematics has been associated with the words "geeky and sophisticated" rather than "creative and artistic”, even among scientists.

I will disclose a few incendiary personal beliefs :

Mathematical talent is rare. By talent I mean - people who tend to arrive at original, elegant solutions and who can quickly derive things that most others memorize. Like other forms of talent - being a really good painter, for instance, perhaps 1 in 100 people have the talent to do it. Everybody can learn to fake it using technique, but that's not the same. Most of the people teaching math have little actual talent in the subject.

We still think it's 1950. During the Cold War, the US worried about falling behind the Soviets in Science. So we started requiring students to take all kinds of math on the theory that we'd create better scientists. Back then, technology was indeed math heavy - Electrical Engineering and such.


The cold war is over. It's doubtful math was decisive in this conflict.

We require too much math. There is no reason at all for every high school
student to take geometry. Those who go on to be surveyors or carpenters can pick up geometry as needed. Similarly for calculus and algebra.

These topics have almost no utility in the digital world. They do not help you to learn to think. They do not make you more analytical. They do not enhance your decision-making skills.

And bluntly : students forget almost all of it in a very short time.

I majored in math. I love math. But I stand by these outrageous claims.

Mathematics subverts educational authority. What? There is no answer key to a real mathematics exam. Each student may take a different approach, and frequently a student will provide a more beautiful proof than the professor. In a metrics-driven, authoritarian, hierarchical educational system - students who show up the teachers are disruptive.


May 27, 2013

What should you do when you realize nothing you do is good enough, let alone phenomenal?

I don't know.

But there's this: I've been lucky to know a few world-class talents in my life. Boston gets an unfair amount of such people.

I noticed one thing they all share in common. They have amazing taste. It seems innate - this ability to know excellence when they see it.

And they are always dissatisfied with their own work. Embarrassed, almost.

Because here's the thing : their ability is trying keep up with their taste, forever falling short.

It is in this chase that true excellence emerges.

The mediocre work is finished with a smug "It's perfect!"

The great work is abandoned in half disgust as another failed attempt at perfection, not quite peaking Olympus.


May 31, 2013

What are the best pictures that showcase insanity?


Jun 1, 2013

Should I learn C++ before college?

I agree with Toby Thain that Functional Programming Languages will help clarify your thinking.and is at the root of such hot languages as Python and Scala.

But you did say you're taking a C++ class this fall. C++ was my first language that I did real work in, from the nineties to 2003 or so.

C++'s syntax is like Vogon Poetry. Like a chicken walked across your keyboard. It is unforgiving and inscrutable. Templates rivals World War II for sheer, inhumane madness.

It is compiled, not interpreted, which makes it even more of a pain in the ass.

Certain features are not enabled by default due to design goals of backwards compatibility with 'C' and not paying performance/space penalties for features you don't need. You only get automatic resource allocation when choosing to use smart pointers like std::shared_ptr or the C++11 std::unique_ptr and when objects stored on the stack go out of scope.

If you choose to use raw pointers and C style arrays it will allow you, in a single line, to render the program unpredictable (by writing into unallocated memory - often in the form of a buffer over-run - or by reading from initialized memory.) although this can be avoided by doing things like using std::vector and its "at" method in place of C style arrays and/or the [] array indexing operator (most implementations also provide checked [] index operators for standard containers when optional debugging features are enabled).

And so on.

Fear C++.

So, yea - since you're taking a class in it, you might want to get a head start. This may save you some long nights in the lab (oh - do they have those any more? OK long nights on your laptop.)

It can't hurt to find out what the textbook is for that course, buy it now and work through it.


Jun 1, 2013

Why do some people dislike Malcolm Gladwell's work?

I find his books very fun to read, but I think his critics have a valid point.

His work is a little too ... Revelational. He keeps declaring that he has discovered the secret mechanisms to things. His revelations are basically hunches; a mix of the obvious, the unproven, and the just plain wrong. You get the sense that when he has an idea he just runs with it, making no attempt to disprove it. He writes uncritically, going from groovy notion to Law Of The Universe so fast that pesky reality has no chance to intervene.

Take, for example, his "10,000 hour rule" from his book Outliers. The gist is you have to practice for 10,000 hours to get good enough at something to become great and impact the world. A few points on this :

Gladwell stole the idea from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, and blew it up from reasonable scientific study to Law Of The Universe (Revelation!)

It's pretty obvious that people who take time to get good at things have a better chance of succeeding.

It's not reliably true. While the Beatles (an example he cites) spent 10,000 hours playing in Hamburg - Johnny Cash could barely play when he first walked into a studio. His minimal and deliberate style - often praised as "Steady as a train, sharp as a razor" was rooted in his inexperience. Such counterexamples are to be found everywhere. Gladwell never looks for them.


In The Tipping Point, Gladwell has had a revelation about how things become popular. Again, he's cribbing from an experiment by social scientist Stanley Milgram. His revelation is that there are a handful of people who make stuff famous, and they fall into the categories of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Again, it's pretty obvious that influential people are often critical to the popularity of something. His categories, though, are very dubious (they seem more aspects of behavior than separate agents. If a critic writes a glowing review of your book in The New Yorker, aren't they doing all three?)

And again, the whole theory isn't true. Lots and lots and lots of things get hugely popular simply because they are fun and interesting and spread organically through friends and neighbors. The Rubik's Cube. Tetris. Jazz. Yoga. Sushi. Craft beer. The hula hoop.

Gladwell is fascinating but his revelations are reckless, unoriginal and overstated.


Jun 2, 2013

What are some things people know in 2013 that hadn't been known ten years before?

The Higgs-boson exists, validating the 'standard model' of physics.

People don't mind using their actual name and other identifying information online.

The music industry will be forced to abandon their traditional sales model in the face of online piracy. A buck a track - the 'album' is basically abandoned as a sales trick.

The collapse of the Soviet Union will not herald a new era of peace for the United States.

You don't have to be white to get elected president (twice!)

The climate is heating up.

There are planets circling other stars.

People want mobile access to the web and each other. They will pay as much for it as they used to pay for a desktop.

Steve Jobs had a genius bordering on prescience: He knew what we want before we did. Apple eclipses Microsoft in both thought leadership and market share. Also, the date of his death.

Bill Gates was serious about giving most of his money away in his lifetime.

'Derivatives' are a dangerous investment instrument as they circumvent stock regulations. Our financial institutions will run amok without oversight and accountability.


Jun 8, 2013

How can I improve 'getting to the point' in discussions and writing?

Say the important stuff first.

There's a trick from the old days of newspapers. Writers would put "who, what, where, when" in the first paragraph. The next paragraphs were arranged in decreasing importance.

This was so that editors could cut the article at any paragraph break. It would fit on the page with minimal information loss.

Practice doing this, and cut yourself off around paragraph four or five.


Jun 9, 2013

Why am I a slow learner and not confident about my intelligence? How do I overcome this problem? How do I improve my intelligence? How do I understand faster? How do I increase my mental capacity?

Sometimes slowness and uncertainty are the stirrings of talent.

I was always amazed at how fast other students could learn, compared to me. They seemed to be just clipping along, scooping stuff up. I needed to pause, check, consider.

In fourth grade I had to stay after class to learn long division. The steps seemed arbitrary and complex.

In 8th grade we started algebra. I couldn't get it, and said "screw the class, I'm going to figure this out on my own."

I took the book home and worked through it at my own pace. I realized the book sucked and went to the library for a better one.

In my own time, I discovered it was all about symmetrical operations to both sides of the equation which teased it into a form which told you something.

It didn't take long for me to catch up with the class. Now I was interested. I raced ahead into calculus.

My answers on tests were correct, but often different than what the teacher expected. I would ALWAYS find myself going to the teacher's desk during an exam to ask them to clarify a point or two.

I went from bottom of the class to the top of it.

8 years later I took the Putnam Exam, a prestigious competition among North American universities that all the top schools compete in.

All that practice figuring things out in my own way and my own time paid off. I ranked #254 in North America, ahead of half the entrants from places like Caltech and Harvard.

It was a great day for someone who once flunked long division and algebra.

Like me, you may need to find your own way to learn, and don't fret over how long it takes.

A bird cannot walk as fast as a person and never will. It is made to fly.


Jun 10, 2013

What is your review of Waze?

★★★

Waze is not perfect, but worth downloading now.

Nothing gets around traffic like Waze. Waze uses data collected from its (many) other users in real time to route you around traffic. You can even ping other users a mile ahead and ask them what's up. When I see lots of brake lights ahead, I fire up Waze.

It's got some accuracy problems. Waze might miss the most efficient route, and will sometimes lead you in circles.

In its defense, Waze declares that it's for your daily commute (a time when you wouldn't normally use GPS at all.) It does shine at that. But for typical use - going on a road trip - Waze serves as a traffic avoidance tool rather than a navigator.


Jun 10, 2013

Is replying, "You have no idea," instead of, “Yes, a lot!" condescending?

Use with caution.

"You have no idea" is safe to use if someone is asking you about a personal flaw. "You get into trouble sometimes, don't you?" "You have no idea!"

Safe. The asker's lack of knowledge is natural (how would you know such a thing!) and the answer isn't bragging (who wants to get into trouble?)

Dangerous : "Wow, you are smart!" "You have no idea!" That's not modest.

Dangerous : "JQuery sure is powerful!" "You have no idea". That insults the knowledge of the person.

PS : I'm fascinated by the nuance of language, but am only fluent in English. So kudos to you for going further than I did. Feel free to Ask-To-Answer similar questions to me.


Jun 11, 2013

What are some interesting facts about Stephen King?

King used to have a terrible problem with cocaine and alcohol. He says he doesn't remember writing Kujo at all.


In order to test whether his fame was due to luck or talent, he wrote under the false name Richard Bachman to see what would happen.


He was one of the first major authors to release a novel online. At first he tried a DRM system, which crashed and was cracked in days. Next he tried simply the honor system. He reported that 70% of readers paid up, declaring the honor system a success.


Jun 11, 2013

Would you use an email proofreading service?

I and other Quora writers would likely answer No.

But there is a lot of Selection bias at work here. You're asking writers (amateur anyway.) So we're pretty confident about our English. (Of course we make mistakes but they are quickly fixed by the author or a good samaritan.)

So don't ask us. But your idea sounds like a good one, I say give it a go. Good luck!


Jun 13, 2013

What's the obsession that mathematicians (and physicists) have with shapes - both simple and complex? What do they see and how do I begin to see the details and beauty they do?

This is the field of Topology.

It started off as an abstract branch of mathematics that keeps asserting itself in the physical world.

It comes up in cosmology, high energy physics, and even molecular biology.

For example, the Calabi-Yau manifold is a candidate for how extra dimensions might curl up in String Theory :

You might try the books, Toplogy by Munkres and Algebraic Toplogy by Hatcher.


Jun 14, 2013

Should I include a picture in my résumé?

This is a weird one.

Developers never do it.

Customer-facing types do, though. The important thing is to look cheerful.


Jun 14, 2013

How would you describe all (or at least most) Quora users in one sentence? Are there any characteristics that define us all?

Brainy, hyper graphic poster children for ADHD.


Jun 14, 2013

How do I visualize alternating current at the atomic level within a conductor?

Zoom out a little.

Electric current happens mostly between the atoms.

The outer shells of atoms ((in a conductor) are promiscuous, they'll give up or accept an electron.

So electrons just skip from one atom to next.

In the case of oscillating current, the electron keeps changing direction. At high enough frequency, it's just vibrating between to atoms.


Jun 14, 2013

Whom should one consider more intelligent, the person who created a Question or the person who Answered it?

Technically, Ramanujan's deathbed "puzzle" was a conjecture. That is, he wrote down an equation without proof.

Which he always did. Most of them were right. Mere mortals need to derive things, and sketch a proof in order to arrive at important identities. Like Mozart, Ramanujan skipped the formative steps and simply wrote down the end result. (He's probably the most intuitive mathematician that ever lived.)

He wasn't asking. He was telling.


Jun 15, 2013

How do I keep my temper in check when arguing with or talking to less intelligent, less informed people?

Accept the fact that the less intelligent, less informed person is often you.

Anger is not born of certainty, it's born of inner conflict. It's rarely the biggest kid in class who starts fights. It's the not-quite-so-big kid who doubts his strength.

Embrace your inner imbecile and you'll find that everyone has something to teach you.


Jun 16, 2013

What is your ideal economic system? Why? What would an ideal world economy look like to you?

A "techno-socialism" would emerge where the necessities of life are provided by the public sector. This would not occur through revolution, but rather because technology had driven down the cost of life's necessities low enough that they could be picked up by the public sector. Housing, food, education, transportation etc. would be free.

A private economy would hum along for luxuries. A person could still get rich by producing art, music, literature, software, etc. A 20% tax would be extorted to fund the above.

Global population is reduced to 10% of what it currently is. This would reduce mankind's depletion of natural resources.

The suburbs are redesigned back into self-contained villages. Your house would be walking distance to shops and galleries (one of which you own). There would be ample public spaces to mingle, study, work, worship or hang out.

Now that billions of us are no longer commuting to factories and cube farms, we can stop burning fossil fuel. We switch entirely to nuclear, solar and wind.

Land is no longer a commodity. With a reduced population and zero population growth, there is no demand for it. Most of the earth's land is returned to its natural state as we have stopped shoving every other species off the planet.

The nation-state has withered away (given that it's primary purpose - competing for the world's resources, has been rendered unnecessary.) People are free to relocate to any village or city anywhere in the world.

A small global military remains to enforce the rules of 1) no raising armies 2) non-aggression between peoples and 3) no civil repression.

Now that people are no longer strugging for (and fighting over) land, food, and fuel we can devote our lives to our true gifts : the creation of culture and the care of each other.


Child of the sixties? Yea. You may say that I'm a dreamer.

But I'm not the only one.


Jun 17, 2013

What is the most useful post you ever came across in Quora?

Michael Wolfe 's popular answer as to why projects tend to take longer than we think.

Michael Wolfe's answer to Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

The gist is that in any sort of endeavor that entails novelty or learning, you're going to spend most of your time dealing with the unanticipated ...

I regularly show this post to managers to explain the padding, to devs to encourage them to pad, and to myself whenever I say "yea I can do that in an hour".


Jun 17, 2013

How true is science?

Paradoxically, science lays no claim to truth. Every scientific assertion is "Our best guess so far."

Scientific knowledge is always at the mercy of new evidence.

For example, Newton's F=MA stood for centuries until Einstein suggested a new formula, which matched Newton's except in the 10th or 20th decimal place. Experiment later validated Einstein.

For another, the Lamb shift was the discovery that some spectral lines are off by just a smidgen from the prevailing theory at the time. Nobel Prize.

Science is our best window onto truth due to its continual self doubt.

It's the one field that progresses by being wrong.


Jun 18, 2013

What can teacher unions do to make sure that incompetent teachers are removed and competent teachers are rewarded?

Push for a massive pay increase. A teacher should earn as much as an accountant.

Push to reduce class size to a cap of 15 or so students.

Reject standardized metrics - these should exist only to detect areas where the student is falling way behind or is gifted.

Rate the teacher primarily by feedback from students and parents.

Push for greater autonomy in teaching methods. Teachers want freedom as much as they want money.

Disband. Unions are antithetical to excellence, as Marc Bodnick pointed out...


Jun 19, 2013

How would society change if the human lifespan increased to 400 years?

Population control would be mandatory. We'd have to reduce global population by about 80% to make room for all the folks hanging' on.

Tolerance for health risks would drop drastically. Smoking, for example, would likely be 100% fatal if done for 150 years. Dangerous activities like rock climbing, skiing would be eliminated or made safer.

The older folks would tend to emerge as a new aristocracy. They have time to earn and invest and reap compound interest. Wealth may become more concentrated in the hands of a few.

Education would be recurring, or continual. A 100 year old degree wouldn't be of much use.


Jun 21, 2013

How did you know when you 'found yourself'?

When you stop looking.

Turns out you were here all along.


Jun 21, 2013

Do you think Einstein’s genius is overrated? Other people who made significant contributions to science may have had higher IQs than Einstein.

No. Good answers here, but I think another, perhaps simpler perspective emerges.

Einstein did something no other human had done. He challenged our most basic notions of space and time and offered alternatives.

It is impossible to overstate how stunning this. Even today, most educated people don't get Einstein's massive revision of reality. For example, people speak of star-light being "from the past", still clinging to the notion of absolute time.

Einstein tore up absolute time, threw away simultaneity, redefined mass itself.
Much of the math was there already, but nobody thought the math was real. Nobody dared suggest that our fundamental understanding of reality is all wrong, and must be replaced by a this new model which is "subtle, but not cruel."

It didn't just take brilliance to conceive. It took staggering courage and imagination to believe - first, before anyone else does.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit;
Genius hits a target no one else can see. -- Arthur Schopenhauer


Jun 23, 2013

Why does it seem acceptable for gay people to criticize religion freely but when religious people criticize gay people freely it is considered a form of hate?

For the same reason I hold racists in contempt.

Beliefs are not morally neutral. They are not created equal.


Jun 24, 2013

Why is it so difficult for someone with no prior programming knowledge to learn programming for the first time? Everything I learn feels disconnected to the larger picture.

You're fiddling with brushes and wondering why you can't make art.

You have to see something first.

Something unique that you want to share with others.

Once you see this - the brushes become the means to this vision ... The impediment, even. You'll become frustrated with them. Good.

You'll mix your paint differently. Experiment with different sorts of brushes. With utensils that aren't brushes at all.

Your first renderings will be awful. Half in disgust, you'll make new ones.

Paint will be everywhere. A few favorite brushes will emerge.

At some point, you'll notice something magical in your pictures. Soon, others will too.

You've got it now.

You're not a painter, you're an artist.

You learned to paint the way Hemingway learned to type.

Out of necessity.


Jun 25, 2013

What are some things films have led us to believe that are actually not true?

That somebody can drive up next to you, wave a gun in your face, bang their car into yours, and this is very, very scary.

Just slam on your brakes.


Jun 25, 2013

What are your views on Barack Obama's statement, "You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience"?

10% understanding that there may be threats of a massive sort - nuclear terrorists, say - that Obama knows about but can't divulge.

70% saddened that this fresh, inspiring, disruptive new voice in America politics has wilted into yet another instrument of state power. Appointing Monsanto and Goldman Sachs executives into government oversight roles, preserving Bush's erosion of civil rights, jailing whistle-blowers.

20% Curious to know what the hell happened. Was it his advisors that turned him? The seduction of power? The insular life of the Presidency? To quote the Joker from The Dark Knight : "What happened ? Did your balls drop off?"


Jun 27, 2013

How much damage would be done from smoking 2500 cigarettes?

.It's about the next cigarette, not the last 2500.

If you quit now, the damage is nothing. Your body will rapidly repair itself and within 6 years your risk of lung cancer, heart attack, etc will be identical to a non-smoker.

But you'll light another. Because the last 2500 got you addicted.

That's the damage. The addiction. The precise health cost is incalculable; you could die of heart attack, stroke, emphysema. You could live to a ripe old age but with diminished strength and immunity.

Quit. Talk to your doctor. Join a support group.

So you don't have to wonder how much better your life would be if you hadn't smoked 250,000 cigarettes.


Jun 27, 2013

What are common misconceptions about your field that non-specialists refuse to believe aren't true?

We're looking for ideas.

As a software developer, i'm constantly approached by people with a Brilliant New Idea for a web site or mobile app.

I'm trying to finish my latest idea. And have a half dozen in waiting.

I'm always amazed at how many folks think programmers would spend years to gain the skills to build things ... only to stand around until somebody tells them what to build.


Jun 28, 2013

What do you think is the reason for the fact that the Earth alone contains life? Science describes what may have happened, but these are only possibilities. Anything new and intuitive is welcome.

I was always a little surprised at how otherwise scientific people bristle at the suggestion that we are alone in the universe.

The scientific method encourages us to reject hypotheses that are not confirmed by evidence. We haven't a scrap of such evidence.

People often point to the staggering number of stars, of star system with planets, of planets with suitable conditions and insist it must be so.

But there is one thing we don't know : What is the probability that life will emerge on a suitable planet? This is the value that people guess at when they do Drake's equation. "This can't be too low, not less than 0.001 ..."

Oh yes it can. It can be much, much lower. That might not be 3 zeros, It might be six thousand zeros.

We cannot yet do that calculation. It's too complicated. Empirically, we have never managed to incept life, we have never observed it elsewhere. We do know that there is no life which is able to contact us (given our current receptivity) and desires to.

So we don't know that magic number, P-L : the probability of life emerging on a suitable planet. So far, what little guidance science provides hints at a downward adjustment in that number.

Why is life on earth alone? We don't know if it is.

If so, it's because the genesis of life is a rarer occurrence than the Big Bang. A billion lifeless universes may explode before a single planet stirs with life.

It's a bleak thought. My hunch is alien life is out there.

But the prospect that we are unique in all the cosmos is equally exciting and carries a new sense of responsibility.


Jun 28, 2013

What has been the response to this recent article that demonstrates RoundUp (and RoundUp-ready genetic engineering) probably contribute to major illnesses?

I would like to see Monsanto launched into the center of the Sun, but as for this article, it lacks the authority of a paper going through the traditional channel of peer-review in a journal of record.

This was published in a Swiss-based "Open Journal" which attempts a new model of scientific publishing. It may be just fine, it's just not trusted yet.

This Discovery blogger calls them a "low-tier pay-for-play" journal. He says the given article "is by two authors with dubious credentials and is such a mashup of pseudoscience and gibberish that actual scientists have been unable to make sense of it."

Page on Discovermagazine

So while I personally applaud a scientific take-down of Monsanto, this article doesn't seem to be it.


Jun 29, 2013

How can I prevent someone from stealing my startup idea before getting a patent? Patents take a couple years to get approved. What are other ways to protect my startup idea?

This comes up a lot on Quora. If you're building software, forget about legal protection against competition.

Patents take years, are generally unenforceable and cost millions to enforce. Nobody will sign an NDA; don't ask - the request itself brands you as clueless. Don't mail stuff to yourself, don't worry about any of that.

Just build it and promote the hell out of it.

See How do you protect a brilliant idea when founding a startup? Are there any measures you can take to ensure no one steals your idea? Should some things be kept under the radar?


Jun 30, 2013

What are the best answers for "Why should I hire you"?

Obviously, you are looking for a candidate who is efficient, diligent and honest.

Hire me and I'll help you look.


Jul 2, 2013

Should I do drugs to become a good musician? Does this anywhere help to understand music in a better way, or is it because music becomes so depressing after a stage that you have to resort to drugs?

I ain't here to moralize. If you wanna drink and do drugs, you are free.

But let me tell you about a drummer named Pete. Pete was handsome and popular and a pretty good drummer.

He just drank a lot. Like, all the time. He would sometimes say things he regretted or wouldn't shown up.

One day, Pete's band had a meeting with a record producer. Pete showed up late, and drunk.

The producer encouraged the band to drop him.

They got themselves a drummer named Ringo, just a few months from global fame. The Beatles.

When you're messed up on alcohol or other drugs, you miss the little opportunities, coincidences, lucky breaks. You're not paying attention and don't have your shit together.

Sure, a lot of musicians do drugs. But I think you'll find the real problems came post-fame,when success came easy.

All fucked up and you don't stand a chance, at anything, IMO.


Jul 2, 2013

I'm in a bit of a confused state. I have these business ideas the market needs, so as to grow and develop. But I've got little or say no finance, need to create a dedicated team and startup something asap. What do you think I should do?

Spend a couple of days browsing the Quora topics on startups.

You'll find a recurrent theme : The internet is not an idea-driven economy. It's about execution, network effects, promotion and luck.

Throw out those NDA forms. Learn to build and promote.

Nobody wants your idea. Your idea won't attract builders, investors or promoters. Product will.

If somebody does want your idea, they'll just take it. And there isn't a thing you can do about it. Patents won't protect you; nobody will sign your NDA's.

I don't mean to be discouraging. By all means - be a visionary. But be a builder of visions.

You will notice this is almost invariably the case with successful internet startups.

The founders built stuff.


Jul 7, 2013

Why do people continuously say that World War III will be triggered because of the lack of water?

To add to the other answers - that this is a problem of distribution and not scarcity - it's really really easy to desalinate water.

Like, really easy. If you can build a fire, boil the seawater, collect the steam in any sort of tube or on a surface, then - presto : drinkable water.

No wood? OK, you can use sunlight as outlined in these steps.

Methods of Water Desalination | eHow

It isn't like oil, where if you don't have it you have to go find it somewhere.
We can't run out. It doesn't get destroyed (though pollution is a problem.)

The problem is that humans consume a lot of it (many more litres per day than oil), so it's costly to store and transport into arid areas. We've got huge populations living far from any water.

But the human race will never, ever die of thirst so long as the sun shines.


Jul 7, 2013

Should the Top Writers of 2013 include those of 2012?

I'm not sure; but it seems that if any Top Writers from 2012 get clipped, they are gonna bitch like crazy. Total drama-storm.

On the other hand, a lot of great new voices have joined the site, the TW 2012 class got their badge, and Quora is after all interested in growth.

How best to deal with this?

(I, for one, am happy to yield my badge if Quora decides to 'graduate' the entire 2012 class.)


Jul 10, 2013

What are some of the reasons that Nazi atrocities on Jewish people are considered a crime, but British atrocities on Indians are not considered a crime? What are some of the reasons behind this racism or selective bias?

We have.

The majority view even in the wealthy European countries who benefitted from imperialism is that is was wrong.

The effects are still painfully evident today. The borders drawn by Great Britain do not contain nations that live in peace (Iraq.)

Mad dictators, from South America to Africa have arisen simply because they have the balls to stare down The West. Idi Amin. Castro.

Violence erupts and re-erupts. The Rwandan Genocide. Pakistan's under military rule and has nuclear weapons.

No sensible person denies this. Nobody's certain of how to fix it but :

The UK owes the government of India one very large diamond. And an apology.

That much is certain.

It's not just the UK. The USA, Spain, France, and other imperial powers made a terrible mess of the world.

They know that.


Jul 13, 2013

Charitable Giving: Does it make sense that some people have billions of dollars while there are many without a nickel, starving to death?

Well. It's not sick. It's just not finished.

Humans have spent most of their existence amidst starvation, disease and a permanent state of war. The "Noble savage" is a poetic myth to reflect open, but don't actually believe it.

You know those beautiful Mayan pyramids in South America, the monuments to a vanquished pre-industrial people?

You know what they were originally painted with?

Human blood.

Now that's sick. The human race is just emerging from a savagery which was anything but noble.

To your question, now we have capitalism. Finance and industry. The billions that end up in the hands of the few are the artifacts of building : railroads, waterways, farms.

The means by which we can finally feed all these people.

Sick world, where people starve? I guarantee you nobody on Rome's seven hills considered for an instant how to feed all of humanity.

Ours is the second or third generation to even care for all the starving. To possess the technology to know about it, and to have a chance to do something about it.

And we owe progress to an unfair world, where a person doesn't have to ask permission to make steel, or power, or trains. He just does it, because he is secure in his belief that the state won't rob him of it. His billions, which are just paper reflecting productivity.

Sick world? OK, maybe. But it's sick from our past, not our future.


Jul 14, 2013

Is it illegal to yell "fuck the police" when passing a group of police officers? What about playing a song with those lyrics while driving past slowly?

This depends a bit on where it happens. There are "catch-all" laws for "disturbing the peace" that are meant to cover general jack assery like this.

And grabbing for a cop's gun is illegal as *hell*. What? You didn't do that?

Cop says you did. Who's a jury gonna believe? A cop doing his job, or some idiot who just told him to fuck off?

"Legal" is not the same as "not busted."


Jul 15, 2013

What does a parent of a black child in the US tell the child about the verdict of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial (June & July 2013)? Answers from black parents or mental health professionals are encouraged.

Step back.

Calm down.

My ancestry is German-Jewish. America has not, for the most part, disadvantaged my group. It has not always been that way, here and elsewhere.

I would explain to a child that 10,000 acts of simple kindness go ignored by the media. "The news is not in the truth business, they are the boredom killing business" (from the movie, Network.)

And what kills boredom in America are the hot topics of race, violence and sex.

Get two out of three and you can sell ads for weeks. Hit a trifecta - it's the OJ trial. Oh the ratings!

But you can turn it off. Any time. You can walk to a playground and see children of all different 'races' together.

You can see a dozen acts of kindness in a day. You can commit one yourself.

That street musician would like a buck, but he'd love you to stop and listen for five minutes. Why not do that? CNN will wait for you.

There's a guy I know, he's homeless. A very talented musician. His glasses got destroyed and he was trying to assemble the pieces.

I asked to see his lenses. "You've got a strong astigmatism in your right eye. Me too. In fact, try these ..."

I offered him my glasses, he put them on, and looked around "Oh yes, that's real good."

I had a spare pair at home, and went and got them for him. Didn't cost me more than 15 minutes.

This was six months ago and he still wears them.

So what's the point? Am I some kind of saint? No - I could have afforded to take him to an optometrist. I'm a selfish dick.

Is the point that I'm superior to him, able to offer the scraps of my possessions? No.

The point is the dude simply could not fucking see. And I gave a shit for 20 minutes, so that he could.

And this happens every day, many times, in every city and village in the world.

While the Zimmerman trial fires us up and sates our boredom, it is not the world around us. What you see depends on where you look.

Each of us, should switch off the TV. We each have much to give. You were created to do good, not consume media.

You will walk past a person tomorrow, who would like a moment of your time, a modicum of your concern.

It's okay. CNN won't miss you.

EDIT : I forgot to mention the guy I gave my glasses to was black and I'm white. Funny, that.


Jul 17, 2013

What creative tools have you used to group brainstorm ideas or solve problems? Which ones did you like and dislike? Was it a useful experience?

Keep it small. No more than five people, otherwise there's too much clamor.

Use a whiteboard. Take a picture if it fills up, and erase it.

No criticism or objections. You can cull ideas later. Most new ideas look crazy and there are 1000 ways to talk them down before they get a chance to reach fruition. Really stick to this one, it's human nature to object.

No leader. The group is circular and without authority.

Use a talking stick. The person holding the talking stick gets to talk for a while, and nobody can interrupt. After a fixed time limit, they have to pass the stick to another and shut up. This prevents people who talk a lot from dominating the meeting.

Sit on the floor. Or stand. Anything but a chair. Positioning yourself in an unconventional way seems to open the mind to unconventional ideas.


Jul 17, 2013

If Apple came out with a Google Glass competitor, what would they call it?

iBalls.


Jul 17, 2013

If I went back in time and gave a first generation iPhone to Steve Jobs and he took it and started mass producing it for the consumer market, who created the iPhone?

Jonathan Ive.


Jul 17, 2013

Was Rolling Stone wrong to put alleged Boston Bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev on the cover?

Yes. It was a terrible idea.

But I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with the opposing answers here as far as they go, but reaching another conclusion.

Being from Boston, I'm also aware that we Boston folks may be a little less than objective about it.

Here's the thing: It was OK to write that article. It was OK to use that picture on the cover of a magazine. The juxtaposition of his image as a cool kid against the horror of the bombing is an edgy, but fair and important point to explore.

It would have been OK for Time Magazine or Newsweek.

The thing - the only thing - that makes this not OK is that it's the Rolling Stone. There is an honorific quality to the cover of this magazine. It almost always features celebrities - musicians and actors.

Many celebrities were launched to fame by appearing there. Agents cajole and petition to get their client on it. Aspiring musicians fantasize about one day making it there.

One musical group cleverly got themselves on the cover by writing a song about how badly they wanted to.


Well we're big rock singers
We got golden fingers
And we're loved everywhere we go
We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show
We take all kinda pills
That give us all kinda thrills
But the thrill we've never known
Is the thrill that'll getcha
When you get your picture
On the cover of the Rollin' Stone
-- Dr Hook, "Cover of the Rolling Stone"


That's the cultural context of that particular magazine. Decades of featuring celebrities have given the cover a glamorous halo.

It's within that context that showcasing a terrorist was a terrible misjudgment.

It would have been fine for any other magazine. It would even have been fine in Rolling Stone, with a black strip across the eyes. Anything, to draw a distinction between him and the usual celebrity.

It was not fine to give Dzhokar the same red carpet treatment as Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix and The Beatles.

It did happen once before. In 1970 Rolling Stone did a cover on Charles Manson. But that was 43 years ago and it was one time.

I don't think that undoes the cultural context of that magazine, which renders the Aug cover deeply offensive.


Jul 18, 2013

Why are Jews in the USA overwhelmingly liberal?

Conservatives seek to preserve culture; liberals seek to evolve it.

Jews and other groups which have experienced discrimination tend toward evolving culture, expanding it to allow other cultures in. Because in the past cultural preservation meant keeping them out or disempowering them.

They have no great nostalgia for a previous time, and look forward to ever-more inclusive cultural change.


Jul 19, 2013

What are basic world and historic facts every person should know?

Lightning cannot harm you if you are in a car, or other metal structure.

The vehicle forms a "Faraday cage", and lightening moves across the outside of it due to the "skin effect.'

Be careful not to touch any interior metal, and that the body is not plexiglass.

EDIT : Paul Reiber has a special warning about CB radios, which can tunnel through the "skin effect" and set your interior on fire. See comments. He warns you to disconnect the grounding wire - hopefully before lightening strikes. Thanks Paul Reiber.


Jul 20, 2013

What if the love of your life tells you that your breasts are small the first time he sees you naked, and that you need to work on them? It sounds like genuine advice, but how can one control the damage to their self-esteem?

When you undressed, it was really him that was revealed for the first time.

And you saw him to be mean, ungrateful, and manipulative.

Now that you've seen him, it's time to find somebody else who looks better naked.


Jul 20, 2013

What kind of website do you think should be created [which is not created till now] and will help you?

I would like to be able to meet people in my town who share a certain interest (beer brewing, app building, motor scooters.)

I would like to be able to converse with them on a per-topic basis, with a layer of anonymity like match dot com.


Jul 21, 2013

Billionaires: What would happen if the world's richest men donated $1 million to every inhabitant on earth?

People would burn the money, or make bookshelves out of it.

"Inflation" is an abstraction; let's step through this. A million dollars a piece is distributed to each of 7 billion people. There's a store down the street with some chickens in stock.

Now everybody can afford a chicken! The shop-keeper can do the Right Thing and keep the prices where they were. Poof - he sells all his chickens in one day. (Who doesn't want a chicken? Besides - there's a rumor that things might sell out, because everyone can afford stuff now.)

So the shops that hold prices steady quickly run out of stock. They call their chicken distributor but are told, "sorry, we've been getting calls all morning. Can we back to you?"

Damn. No more chickens.

The Evil Chicken Shop across town says, "now wait a minute. Since everybody's out of chickens - I'm going to sell mine for ... a half million dollars each! Don't like it, f- you. Good luck finding a chicken."

At first you balk. No way am i spending a half million for a chicken. But your family is getting hungry. Maybe it's not such a bad idea, until this chicken thing blows over.

And there's another problem with the chickens. The truck drivers who were supposed to deliver what few chickens remain didn't show up for work. They are drunk in Aruba celebrating their new-found wealth. Who wants to drive chickens around if they don't have to?

Damn. This so did not work out. You're rich but a chicken cost a half million bucks.

Oh? The half million-dollar chicken place just ran out because people got hungry. Now chickens are 750,000.

Better gas up quick before you go buy one. There's a huge line and gas is $250,000 a gallon. They tried to hold prices down but ..,


Jul 22, 2013

What questions should a leader ask to validate a software development project plan?

"Mind if I talk to the people who are writing it?"

(How many layers of management do you have ?!)


Jul 22, 2013

What can I learn/know right now in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life?

If a toilet begins overflowing and just won't stop, turn this valve clockwise. What it's there for. Shuts off the water supply.


Jul 23, 2013

Can the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding goal of $32M in 30 days be successful?

I would not be surprised if Mark Shuttleworth makes up for any shortfall with a last minute and hefty donation of his own.


Jul 25, 2013

My friend never studied during college, but now he has a great job and recently he became a millionaire. How is this possible?

Disrupt a class and they throw you out.

Disrupt an industry and they buy you out.


Jul 25, 2013

Invention and Inventions: Is there any truth behind Lester Hendershot's electricity generator?

No.

This free energy myth has been recurring for decades now.

A simple thought experiment dispels them all.

There are countries beyond the reach of Big Oil and Big Finance.

They don't control Iceland, who announced they will be off of fossil fuels entirely by 2050. They sure as hell don't control North Korea. Or the People's Republic of China.

Anybody who discovered free energy need simply jump the next plane to North Korea and they'd buy it for $100 million. The investment would pay for itself in months in oil savings.

Done. It really is that simple.

This has never happened.

Ergo, free energy does not exist.


Jul 26, 2013

What is the impact of Recession/Depression in any economy in the long run? Do economies behave differently if they have been through a recession/depression in past?

As few long-term results come to mind. There are many parallels to nature during an ice age or extended drought :

There's a die-off of weak companies. Companies which weren't efficient, or slow to evolve in the face of changing demand and technology, breathe their last and die. RIP Block Buster.

Speculative bubbles are halted (for a time). Prior to the '08 financial crisis there was a dot com bubble followed by a real estate bubble.

Most recessions herald new financial regulation (e.g., the stock market 'circuit breakers')

Criminal activity is exposed. In every recession there's a Madoff or an Enron who is just cooking the books. The sudden downturn makes it impossible to hide and they go to jail.

Labor evolves. As big companies contract, employees find other jobs, switch careers, go back to school or get training. (Some, of course, just fall on their face.)


Jul 26, 2013

What is your opinions on our website? Dezine.com

The sign-on popover is so bad I would strongly urge you to take the site down until you fix it.

Otherwise it appears that you may not even have a website at all; that this is a ruse to harvest FB data from the helpfulness of Quorans.

I'll assume better intentions on your part. Add an anonymous mode that gives users a taste of content so they can decide whether or not to log in.

You might be able to get away with this after you're famous. Right now, every second it's there is killing you.


Jul 29, 2013

Have you ever handled desktop application controls using VBScript?

The basic idea is to create a WshShell object around the target application and use the SendKeys method to tab through the various controls and send simulated keyboard input.

SendKeys Method

See this example,

Automating and Controlling applications with VBScript

Hope this helps, it's literally been a decade since I've used VB so I probably can't be of further help :)


Aug 2, 2013

What's a witty comeback to: "Women should be seen, not heard"?

"I'm sure all five of your senses are quite safe from female contact."


Aug 3, 2013

What would you do if you have discovered the secret for unlimited free energy? Please read additional details.

Find a better armed rogue group that has to import oil.

Like North Korea.


Aug 6, 2013

Why would someone pay $140M for Jackson Pollock's "No. 5"?

Pollock did something bold, something non-obvious at the time but which in retrospect seems inevitable. This is a pretty good definition of genius.

Let me back up and try to explain.

Art began as rendering. It was about image. It started like this, on the wall of a cave 30,000 years ago.


Not bad, huh? Humans got better and better at it, learning to render perspective, reflection and refraction - refining their technique until they could do this :

(Still Life with Gilt Goblet, Willem Claesz Heda, 1635.)

Wow. OK. With enough technique, you can render about anything.

But somehow ... that wasn't enough. To be a human camera. Some artists began to get ... restless, I suppose. To let a little technique go and search for something else.


Monet's rough brush strokes and crass colors are quite intentional. He's trying to connect with more than just the garden in front of him, he wants to convey something about how he perceives it, how it leaps and shimmers with vibrancy.

Art has begun to stray from image.

And then technology intrudes very abruptly with this :

The camera. Gone are the years of practice with paint and brushes. Capturing an image has become a commonplace commodity that - yes - a kid can do.

The rift between art and image is widening. Enter Picasso.

Picasso deliberately destroys the laws of perspective. What if we could see things from all angles?


And then comes Pollock. Pollock isn't an artist, he is a culmination. The ultimate bulldozer of post-modernism, at just the right time in human history, he poses a question - so simple in retrospect but so elusive until now :

"What if the painting isn't of anything?"

He discards image altogether and throws paint at a canvas, almost in rebellion.

Art is painting and surface and nothing else. It is not representative. it represents itself.


Pollock's paintings are not easy to make. There was great energy and rhythm expended as Pollock engaged in a sort of dance. He used the term "Action painting."

Pollock's work changed everything - very quickly. Other artists, freed from the shackles of image, were now accepted. The center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York as the Abstract Expressionism movement took hold.

Stella :

Rothko:


And in reaction to the Abstract Expressionism movement, pop art emerged :


To finally answer your question : Why is a Pollock so valuable? Because Pollock changed the human aesthetic in the 20th century more than any other artist.

Many people make art. Very few change it.

EDIT : In the comments, Andy Lee Chaisiri calls me out for euro-centrism, a criticism not easily evaded.


Aug 10, 2013

Is it prudent to first start up a venture when young, just to test the waters and 'learn by doing' before moving on to one's main idea, one's Dream idea, or it is just foolish to start up with such a half-hearted attempt, showing a lack of conviction?

Suppose there are two women in your town. #1 is smart and shares your interests and attractive and seems like your dream girl. #2 is ... Meh.

Should you ask out #2 to get practice before approaching #1.

Hell no. It's a waste of your time and girl #2. Also, girl #1 will move on and find somebody.

And #1 is likely to turn you down anyway, making the while exercise ridiculous.

Don't test the waters. Test yourself by jumping in.

I can't promise all your dreams will come true but .... You'll swim.


Aug 10, 2013

What are some reasons why Quora users would block another user?

I never have blocked anyone, which isn't to disparage people who have.

Here's the thing. I don't get into arguments in Quora or any other online medium. Ever. Ever.

If there is some civil and substantive disagreement, I will sometimes engage the person but with an eye toward 'winding' down. That is, my reply is shorter than their comment.

I usually don't respond, and often up vote comments that take a contrary view.

If a person is just nasty, I ignore it.

This habit developed over a long time, before the web, on forums like Usenet. "Flame wars" were the norm.

Eventually, I realized that letting other people online get me riled up gives them a claim on my time and energy.

That the argument is never won because it never ends. That other readers have dropped off in boredom a long while back.

"Strange game. The only winning move is not to play". -- the film War Games.


Aug 10, 2013

Why is Karl Marx so revered in academia? They think of capitalism as evil.

Marx thought really, really hard about things. Unlike virtually all political manifestos, Marx is a serious philosopher. He avoids rhetoric, repetition and hyperbole.

He considers very carefully a man's relation to society, to work, to the material world, to his neighbor.

He has done his homework in studying other philosophers, especially Hegel.

Unlike the insane ramblings of Mein Kampf or the lazy meandering of Ayn Rand, Marx is a real intellectual force whether you accept his thesis or not.


Aug 10, 2013

Why are cops persistently stereotyped in pop culture to love donuts?

As a student I worked at an all night place that served coffee and donuts.

Both were free for cops.

Nobody would consider robbing us as police cars were a constant presence in our lot.

Symbiotic.


Aug 10, 2013

What is the most useless fact you know?

My MySpace password.


Aug 11, 2013

Is an upvote an acceptable response to a compliment on one's answer or comment?

I don't upvote compliments because it seems immodest.

To me an upvote says "I agree" which isn't appropriate to a compliment.

I don't respond at all, which I hope is not rude or unappreciative.


Aug 11, 2013

If you opened your eyes and someone whispered to you, "We've called for a priest. He will be here in a moment," what do you think your response would be, given that you were able to comprehend the situation? Would you have any final words?

"Tell the priest to skip it. Quick, please write this down.

This was great. Thanks to everyone who was kind to me. There were thousands, and a handful of people who were most kind. You know who you are.

Those that I have wronged, forgive me. I was weak in those moments.

What a miracle - life - how intricate, how subtle, how amazing!

Thank you so much. I'd like to stay but I am grateful to have been here at all. Somewhere a baby's eyes are opening for the first time, and it's their turn now.

Good bye.


Aug 12, 2013

What are the main takeaways from Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography?

"You will be wildly successful. Your products will be revered all over the world, they will launch new industries. Your fame will never dim.

You will have amazing powers of persuasion. You will change the world. When you die, millions will mourn you from afar.

For all of this I only require that you have no close friends. You will betray and berate those near to you, including family. You will have no friendly rivals - only bitter enemies. People won't trust you.

Just sign here, and we may conclude our little transaction. In blood, please. A small archaic formality, I'm afraid."


Aug 12, 2013

Why do you use Quora?

I use Quora to connect with other minds.

It's not a Social Network, it's a Mental Network.


Aug 13, 2013

Religion,Philosophy, Economics and Socio Political Issues: How can I make contact with influential people?

I love Jeremiah Stanghini''s answer.

A couple of things about your question give me pause tho. You've got all these ideas in different areas that you believe have value. You want influential people to help you develop them.

So you want something from them. You want them to do something for you. Unlike asking questions as in Jeremiah's post, you want a favor.

Influential people hear this all day long. They have to turn down their own cousins. And you want to cold call them?

Secondly, and more importantly, you said you want your ideas further developed. Say what? You got anything already ...developed ... To show? That might get their attention. Otherwise it's just a half baked notion. Don't nobody got time for that.


Aug 16, 2013

What is an example of a great person who turned failure into victory?

A Visigoth named named Alaric I (~ 370 - 410 AD), served as a military commander for the Roman Empire under the emperor Theodosius.

When Theodosius died and the empire was split between his two sons, Alaric had hoped to be promoted from commander to general. He was passed up for any promotion. The Visigoths were insulted by this, as well as their disproportionate losses in battle in their service for the Roman Empire.

The Visigoths declared Alaric to be their king. Alaric raised an army and set out for the heart of the Roman Empire.

After twice laying siege to Rome, on the third attempt - Alaric's army got through the gates. Rome fell to the Visigoths on Aug 4, 410.

Never had Rome been invaded since she rose on her seven hills. This date generally marks the fall of the Roman Empire and heralded what is sometimes called the "Dark Ages."


Aug 16, 2013

What is better, to have a woman who loves you for you, or loves you for the money you have acquired?

My girlfriend took me to the Ritz-Carlton, years ago, in Boston.

I couldn't help overhearing the couple next to us. There were these generalized questions that indicated a first date.

The guy was wealthy (or acting like it.). He got into an argument with the sommelier about wine - and lost.

He ordered steak (an odd choice at a place which specializes in French food.)

Once the order was taken, he PROPOSED marriage to this woman.

Shaken, she pointed out that they had just met. The guy brushed her objection aside and promised her a life of opulence.

She then brought up her own ambitions, and asked him if he just grabbed at whatever he wanted.

He proudly said yes, not realizing how deep a hole he had dug himself into.

She said, "My answer is no, and my answer is final."

He got angry and refused his food when it came. She munched away and spoke of her work, her daughter, and Boston.

She thanked him and said she needs to go home because she's paying a sitter. He reached for his wallet and she said something I'll never forget :

"I have never relied on the wealth of a man for what I need" ... "You should really try that."


Aug 16, 2013

Ancient China: Why was the abacus (Chinese) invented?

It almost certainly arose for the same purpose as writing did : For trade.

Arithmetic and record keeping became essential as trade became more complex.


Aug 17, 2013

How would you characterize, in one sentence, the essence of Quora?

In Quora form, it would be a question, not a sentence:

"What would happen if nerds from around the world formed a new nation, and put their nerdism behind a single global nerd-plex?"


Aug 18, 2013

Is corruption as prevalent in America, if not more so than in the so called "third world countries"?

No.

Try to bribe a cop that's pulled you over and ... You're going to have a pretty bad day. Similarly for judges, health inspectors, etc.

For the most part America plays by the rules compared to, say, Mexico.

A lot of it is simple standard-of-living. It's harder to bribe people who earn enough to support their family.

We may, however, want to draw a distinction between "micro-corruption" and "macro-corruption."

While you can't slip a cop a hundred bucks to get out of a speeding ticket, Goldman and Sachs or Monsanto can influence lawmakers to the tune of billions.

In sheer dollar value, the USA is possibly the most "macro-corrupt" country on earth.


Aug 18, 2013

Who, in your opinion, had the most interesting mind in history, and why?

Mozart heard perhaps the most exquisite and sublime music in all the world - in his head. Complete symphonies - he just heard them and wrote them down without a single mistake or correction.

As he was dying, he heard and wrote his immortal Requiem Mass in D-minor; a mass for the dead. He almost finished writing it ... And died.


Aug 19, 2013

Why don't Quora and Wikipedia collaborate to create a more comprehensive knowledge base?

It's not just the format ...

Quora is a primary source. Content originates here. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, it always summarizes and references content elsewhere.

Quora is purely 'inclusionary' : any question can be asked. Wikipedia teeters between 'exclusionary' and 'inclusionary'. That is, content has to be deemed 'notable' or else it's removed.

Wikipedia strives for a single definitive article on any topic, and to resolve disputes within a single body of text. Quora allows - encourages even - competing opposing answers.

Quora leaves content within the control of the author. I can suggest an edit but not impose one. Wikipedia allows anyone to edit any content.


So these are more than format issues, these are differences in intent and function.


Aug 20, 2013

Who would have won the Second World War if the United States joined the Axis with Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union and the UK?

Interesting what-if.

The USA was the great arsenal of the Allies; America's enormous industrial capacity critically re-armed Great Britain.

However, Germany couldn't cross the English Channel because they couldn't gain air superiority.

So I don't think Great Britain would have fallen.

I also seriously doubt that any force on earth could have stopped the Soviet Army, with superior tanks, intact supply lines and millions of enraged troops from driving straight into Berlin.


Aug 21, 2013

Why was only Hitler and his idea of Nazism condemned so much while Britain, France and most of Allied Forces were colonizing and violating human rights?

Look, I get it. The European powers nearly (and sometimes literally) enslaved native populations, and the conquest of North America resembles genocide to a degree.

The European Imperial powers are not blameless, by any means. But there is a distinction between them and Nazi Germany. Maybe this is hair-splitting, maybe not. I leave that decision to the reader. But here are some differences I see :

Time. By the 20th century, slavery was a distant memory and entire continents were not being cleared of their native populations. Nazism was a moral anachronism, so to speak.

Intent. It is true that American colonists deliberately killed a vast number of native inhabitants. (Although smallpox killed many more.) But the colonists just wanted the land. If possible, they would have been happy to deposit the natives somewhere else. The Nazis, on the other hand, expressly desired to wipe Jews and other groups off the face of the earth. Killing is killing, agreed. But somehow one senses an important difference between "I want your land so i'm shooting you" and "you are unfit for human life and I'm shooting you and your children and everyone one of your kind I can find."

Mechanism. Building death factories is beyond the imagination of even the most trigger-happy colonial conquerer. There is something about killing people that way that rises to a new level of evil.


The tide was rising in the 20th century in terms of Europe's humanity. Germany suddenly plunged to depths never before seen.


Aug 23, 2013

How did Tesla practice abstinence?

Nikola Tesla showed significant signs of being on the autism spectrum. His OCD was famous, as was his obsession with pigeons and purely visual thinking.

So it's plausible that he may have had issues with anxiety, sensory issues with touch, a fear of connection.

(To be clear, most people on the spectrum are not asexual, and I'm speculating like crazy.)


Aug 24, 2013

What causes people to be jerks? How do they find happy relationships, especially if they don't consider other people's feelings?

I've dated a few jerks (hey, women can be jerks too.). I'm pretty sure, in younger years, I've been the jerk myself.

Listen : Western culture takes a very 'diagnostic' view of negative behavior. I blame Freud, but whatever. People who are mean or destructive were ... Made that way! By the Awful things that happened to them!

Oddly, we never - never - attribute generosity or talent to a person's experiences. They're just "naturally good."

Back to jerks. I don't think there's any sense trying to deconstruct the jerk to find the cause. I think it's simpler than that.

We have to learn a lot of things in the course of our lives so that we are good to others and to ourselves. An awful lot of things.

To forgive others. To listen to others. To admit mistakes. To not get angry or impatient - to quietly wait your turn.

To lose the idea that you are cut from a finer cloth than the rest of humanity. That yours is a high and lonely destiny.

To let go of the desire to fix every one and every thing in your world.

To turn away from the insecurities for which arrogance is a mask.

And so on and so on. These are the things that makes us happy.

People will learn these things at their own pace. Some pick it up right away, some take decades, some never do.

The jerk's problem is that they haven't learned yet and they are unhappy. It's best to walk away from them and realize they are a work in progress.

"Though they may be blinded, there is still a chance that they will see."


Sep 1, 2013

You are/were cheating on your significant other, what can/did your wife do to repair the relationship and get you back?

You are not broken. Your husband is.

You did not break your wedding vows. Your husband did.

You did not sneak, you did not lie, you did not break the bond of trust. Your husband did.

You are not broken, your husband is.

You are not broken, your husband is.

Your willingness to forgive him is rare and amazing. I don't know if I could do that, or if many women I know could.

That is already more than enough. You should not endeavor to change something about yourself - lose weight, change your hair, whatever - to get him back.

Your love is already perfect.

I suggest you confront your husband. Let him know you are willing to give him another chance if he changes. Maybe he needs therapy. Maybe he has some kink he wants to express to you. Maybe he has impulse control issues.

You are not broken, your husband is. Most women would throw his ass to the curb. You're willing to forgive. But he has to change.

The question you posed here is for him to answer about himself, not you.

Good luck. I hope your husband makes himself worthy of your love. If he doesn't, I assure you somebody will.


Sep 2, 2013

Do you think most homeless people deserve to be homeless?

No.

You - yes you, are just a few steps from homelessness.

Let's suppose you have it all - millions in the bank, loving wife, good friends.

A scandal of some sort - maybe not your fault - maybe an IRS thing, maybe a partner who embezzles, maybe just a market crash, leaves you 100,000 in the hole.

You know how you sometimes had those "off days"? You know - weren't perfectly mentally healthy? Suppose that turns into major mental illness.

You know how you like a few drinks with your friends and have dabbled in drugs? Suppose, in your recent pain, this blows up into alcoholism and drug addiction.

So your wife dumps you. The bank forecloses on your home. Your country club friends don't answer your calls.

Bang. You're homeless. How did you get here?

How the hell do you get back?


Sep 5, 2013

What do you think of my start up idea?

I think it's a great idea. I like the name "Cargo Cult" better, but whatever.

Getting hold of very exotic items from afar is not a well-serviced need, as far as I know.


Sep 5, 2013

If I hung an “Arbeit macht frei” sign above my dorm room door as a geeky joke, would anyone be right in asking me to take it down?

You've got to be kidding me.


The entrance to Auschwitz is still a recurring nightmare to a very few survivors. Any reference to it besides that of reverent memorial is insensitive beyond words.

Leave it alone.


Sep 7, 2013

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. What is right or wrong about this statement?

Mozart has to eat gruel in a cafeteria with 10,000 other people.


Sep 8, 2013

If Saddam Hussein didn't invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990, would he still be alive and in power in Iraq, and be an ally of the west?

I wouldn't say 'ally', but prior to his invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was seen as a friendly-ish oil supplier to the West, and a secular government with a common enemy : Iran.

Kuwait, however was seen as a 'most-favored' oil supplier. Perhaps the term Ally may be loosely used.

The invasion, to the US, was an intolerable attack on our oil interests. It also drove the Saudis into closer alignment with the USA, allowing the US to install airbases there.

So Hussein got on America's shit-list for life.

Absent the invasion of Kuwait, he'd probably be alive and in power.


Sep 8, 2013

Is the NSA's spying on the American people justified by the risk of terrorist attack?

Our constitution guarantees protection against "unreasonable search and seizure."

In 1880, that means I cannot sneak up to your mailbox, steam open your envelopes and read your mail.

In 2013, that means I cannot create an 'encryption standard' (means of protecting passwords against interception) which contains a back door which I can crack with super computers. I cannot listen in on your phone calls and peek at your email.

The terrorist 'threat' does not nullify this constitutional guarantee. The founding fathers secured this right for us at the risk of being hanged en masse by the British.


Sep 8, 2013

What is your review of Europa Report (2013 movie)?

★★★★

4.5 stars actually.

This low budget sci-fi is stunning. It has the eloquence of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the stark minimalism of The Andromeda Strain.

Although it's visually stunning, it's the actors that carry the film. It is realistic, gripping, and never descends into bathos.

Smart and taut, this film may yet bring the science back into sci-fi and raise the bar for the whole genre.

SPOILER ALERT : (Scroll down)
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Yes, the humans encounter an alien. Yes, the alien kills them. But the alien creature is not evil, and is not portrayed as such. It's simply hungry, and the electric lights the humans use act as a dinner bell.

Despite their mortal sacrifice, the astronaut's discovery of the creature is hailed as the greatest scientific advance in history, and the creature itself celebrated as proof of a fertile cosmos, teaming with life.


Sep 8, 2013

Doubt: Is vapor cigarette really a solution to those who can’t throw their tobacco yet?

The best solution is to get off nicotine.

There are some medications your doctor might prescribe, like Chantix.

The next best is a nicotine substitute like gum or the patch, available over the counter in the USA. These contain controlled and regulated amounts of nicotine and have gone through FDA approval.

If you have no success with these, e-cigs are much safer than cigarettes as they do not contain carcinogens anywhere near the level of tobacco smoke, no 'tar', carbon monoxide and the 100's of other toxic elements of tobacco smoke. However they are not regulated, so you have to do your homework on their source and contents. They also deliver an uncontrolled amount of nicotine.

In terms of safety, they are the least safe way to get of tobacco but MUCH safer than smoking.

As a life-long smoker who's tried everything, my doctor approves of my use of e-cigs for harm reduction.


Sep 9, 2013

I am very emotional person. Sometimes I even become hyper over tiny things. I always tend to think emotionally. Please advise?

Pause for a second. Ask yourself : on this date, last year - what were you most upset about?

You probably don't remember.

Feelings are fleeting.


Sep 10, 2013

What can I do to motivate myself for programming regularly for 4-6 hours?

Getting "in the zone" can be tough for a lot of people, myself included. A few tips from my own life and observing others:

Shut down social media. Don't open Facebook, Quora, or any other distractions. Not even for a "quick check."

Hang out with other people who are also coding. They usually "get it", and keep conversation down to brief banter or code questions, which keeps everybody in the zone.

Music helps. Something 'ambient' which is not too engaging, but drowns out mental noise.

If you find yourself still unable to focus, you may want to talk to a doctor about ADHD. Some very bright people benefit greatly from medication that helps them focus.

Ask yourself : is coding for you? Do you really like it? If you always have to make a Herculean effort to do it - maybe it's just not your thing. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's a great mistake to pursue something you have no affinity for.


Sep 10, 2013

If someone goes to US, and at a public forum says, 'Most corrupt people come from blacks', then, that person would be crowned as a racist or not? Will there be furor over it like it happened in India?

Yes, it would be considered racist.

And untrue. Most corruption in the USA occurs in the most privileged class, which is disproportionately white.


Sep 10, 2013

General Knowledge: What do you mean by the term Back 2 Back?

It means "in succession", that is, the second thing happens right after the first.

So if two movies are playing "back to back", the second starts soon after the first one finishes.


Sep 11, 2013

I don't know how to make aim & do the things what you love to do?

Your, dear asker, are expressing the same sentiment that so many others in Quora share.

You want to join a STARTUP, or start one yourself.


Sep 11, 2013

What are some of the best things said or heard after surgery?

I knew a Russian skater once, Tatiana. She had a bad fall and Russian doctors performed surgery, unsuccessfully. She also developed a nasty infection.

The US Government offered to treat her, and she was flown to Boston and whisked into emergency surgery.

Upon wakening, she looked around briefly, heard the staff talking, and said in Russian :

"Wake me up when I can speak English."


Sep 11, 2013

What are some of the craziest break-up stories you have heard or experienced?

In 1999, a Los Angeles woman named Denise Rossi hit the lottery for $1.3 million. Eleven days later she demanded an immediate divorce from her husband. She didn't tell him about the lottery. She told no one at all.

Two years after their divorce, a misdirected piece of mail alerted her ex-husband to her winnings. He sued her.

The Judge ruled that she had violated asset disclosure laws and committed fraud.
He awarded the money to her ex-husband.

Every. Last. Dime.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/17/news/mn-34537


Sep 11, 2013

What should be a decent reply to the the question why I am jobless from last 6 months?

It sounds like you wanted a job involving Java and Algorithm design. So you took six months to learn that. Nothing wrong with taking some time to upgrade your skills.

Also, the last time the economy was this bad ... World War II broke out.


Sep 12, 2013

Why is being nice a good idea?

There was actually a mathematical experiment to study this question (an idealized version of it, anyway.)

It involved repeated trials of The Prisoner's Dilemma, where various computer programs played against each other round-robin style.

At each turn, the program could be "nice" for a small pay-out, or be "mean" for a quick gain. Unless both programs are mean to each other at the same time, in which case they are penalized.

This is documented in the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

All sorts of strategies were introduced into the game. The result :

The winning algorithm was always nice at first, and quick to forgive a single act of mean-ness. (In fact, it ignored a single act of mean-ness, and retaliated with a single mean move only in response to two subsequent mean moves.)

What is interesting is that the winning algorithm scored fewer points against its rival in almost every one-on-one match. But the mean algorithms beat each other up so bad that the nice one came out on top overall.


Sep 12, 2013

What is the technical term for when one's emotional heart shuts down?

Closure.


Sep 14, 2013

What do you think is the probability that a blog will still be available on the net (or equivalent) in 100 years? I'm not thinking political or social reasons but technical, will everything be saved and available?

Sure, it will be saved - the same way early wax cylinder recordings have been digitized and archived.

But it will be of interest to only a small group of hobbiests, having been transcended by new technology we can only guess at.


Sep 14, 2013

What are the most important aspects of giving a presentation that people do wrong most of the time?

You must have something unexpected, non obvious, compelling, and clear to say.

Most presentations fail these criteria and should not be given in the first place.


Sep 14, 2013

What is an intuitive explanation for eiπ=1?

OK,

Complex numbers (real plus imaginary part) exist in a plane. Real is x-axis, imaginary is y-axis.

Multiplication is rotational. Multiple any point by i, and you rotate it by 90 degrees.

Things are spinning .... We see the notion of a circle in the distance.

So what if we want to rotate a point by an angle other than 90 degrees? That's where exponents come in.

Suppose we want to rotate a point by 42 degrees (about the origin). We multiply that point by 2^( theta * I) and we're almost there. We did rotate the point by 42 degrees (theta), but we stretched it, changing its distance from the origin. Oh - we've got to convert degrees to radians, but that's a detail.

2's not the right base. But some number is. By an astonishing mathematical connection, the base that rotates but does not change the distance is e.

e^( i theta) faithfully rotates a point by theta rads when u multiply by it. Let theta range from 0 to 2 pi rads (0 to 360 degrees) and it sweeps out a perfect circle of radius 1.

When theta = pi rads (180 degrees), you're just multiplying the complex number by -1. The x- coordinate and y-coordinate get their sign flipped. You'd gone halfway round a circle.

The complex plane spins. e is that magic number that spins without stretching.


Sep 16, 2013

What is a woman's most attractive feature/trait to a man?

Self confidence. It also helps if they're not wearing terribly much.


Sep 16, 2013

Who created this painting?

A google image search turns up lots of results. It appears to originate with this artist on DeviantArt ...

Fantasy Creature 1 by ~drakullas on deviantART

It's been copied in so many places though, it's hard to tell.

You can search google for images like this : Google Images

(Click the photo icon in the search bar and upload the image.)


Sep 16, 2013

Five years after the global financial meltdown/crisis, what lessons have we truly learned and more importantly addressed?

Don't deregulate the banks.

Real estate is not a loss-proof investment.

Banks are not stock brokers.

Goldman Sachs and Moody's are not to be trusted.

Do not allow the creation of investment instruments that circumvent regulations.

Addressed? I got nothing.


Sep 17, 2013

What are common activities people get wrong every day but don't know it?

Throw out plastic bottles. Squeeze the bottle first, then put the cap on tight. It takes up a fraction of the space in the recycle bin.

Put high octane gas in their car. High octane has absolutely no advantage except for special engines with high compression ratios.

Leave the tea bag in their tea. Tea turns bitter and rancid if left to brew too long.


Sep 18, 2013

How can I develop interest in programming?

We don't develop motivation.

Motivation develops us.

If you like the idea of being able to program, but you don't find yourself enjoying the learning process, it might not be your thing.

I've love to be a musician. But the practice is sheer drudgery to me, I can't pick it up fast enough to have fun. I've spent a couple if years trying. Just not good it, no affinity for it.

Not motivated. So I let other people play.

However, you do have to give it a chance. We're awful at everything, at first. Why not try to write something simple and fun to show off to your friends?

A little game or a web app? You'll feel motivation if you have to force yourself to stop doing it.


Sep 19, 2013

What do you want to change in American culture?

Great answers here.

I'll add - I wish we'd stop caving to terrorists.

I just got back from a concert in Boston, and my backpack was taken away. You can't bring a backpack to any crowded event in this city. (The marathon bombs were in backpacks.)

There's no need for it. Or to take off our shoes and belt at the airport. To tap our phones. To lock people up without due process.

We are all reasonably safe. It's our democracy that's in danger.


Sep 20, 2013

I would like to marry my girlfriend as soon as possible. Her family will agree for her to get married if she is pregnant. Should I rush to impregnate her? Will this rush her to make the decision to get married soon?

Whoa!

Back up! Way the hell up!

One does not go around 'impregnating' women for any reason other than that you both dearly want a baby.

Also, drop the word 'impregnating' from your vocabulary. In fact, don't use any verb which has a woman as an object for six months.


Sep 21, 2013

What geometric formulas govern polygons in such a way that the phenomenon observed in the details below occurs?

This gets into abstract algebra. The points of a polygon all fall within a 'field extension' of the integers, the integers 'adjoined' with just a single fraction.


Sep 21, 2013

What advice would you give to young adults about success: defining it, achieving it, etc?

Do not accept any one else's criteria for success.

Your life is unique. It's your job - and a hard one - to make sense of it.


Sep 22, 2013

How could Git be improved?

A little syntactical sugar (extra commands that map to existing commands + options.). would be nice for newbies like me. Some of the command variations are unintuitive and make life hard on newbies.

For example, the one of the first things a developer wants to do is revert a file to their last commit. So
git revert filename

Would be better than git checkout -- filename.


Sep 22, 2013

This country has a particular type of fish which kills people. Not like a piranha but the fish should be cut with very special blades into thin and translucent pieces else eating the fish causes death. Identify this country?

I believe you are referring to the Japanese blowfish Fugu, whose liver (and some other parts) is highly toxic but the rest of which is a delicacy. The chef must be careful not to kill the diner.

Chefs will display to the patron their certificate if training in how to safely prepare Fugu.

The Emperor once forbade the entire imperial family to eat Fugu.

So some delighted in an indulgence denied to the Emperor and his kin. There are still occasional mistakes and people still die from eating Fugu.


Sep 22, 2013

What is the most recommended coding language for creating full blown human AI?

That's like asking what color you should paint a cold fusion reactor.

It doesn't matter because we have no idea how to build one.

We have no idea how to replicate human intelligence. All programming languages are "isomorphic to the lambda calculus" (the same in essence.)

We cannot construct a mind - or facsimile thereof - in any of them.


Sep 22, 2013

What are some real life good habits that programming gives people?

Anticipate you will make mistakes.

Simpler is better.

Don't promise anything you don't yet fully understand.

Keep learning.

Nothing finished is perfect.


Sep 23, 2013

How do the present German Jews feel about the Holocaust?

I am of German/Jewish descent. A rather rare breed actually - there were only 500,000 Jews in all of Germany in 1932. It's hard to understand why the Nazis were so obsessed with such a small minority.

The name Reiss appears prominently on the rolls of victims, especially the German "gateway" camp of Theresienstadt concentration camp.

I won't speak of revulsion and horror because I believe that sentiment is nearly universal. As it is for the Rwandan Genocide, American Slavery, and all too many occurrences of mass inhumanity.

Inexplicably, as a young child I was haunted by nightmares of yellow brick buildings, of doctors who were malevolent. The dream ended with my looking down at my hand to see my fingernails turn blue. (Years later I learned this is what cyanide gas does.)

Strange because I was 4-5 and certainly had little to no knowledge of the Shoah (holocaust), much less my German descent, etc. But those nightmares were so vivid. i am not much for the supernatural. But there is no denying my recurring dreams of yellow brick and blue fingernails..

Theresienstadt

Perhaps it's some strange coincidence, or I came across some information - i don't know.

Anyway. What do I think now? I said I would avoid discussion of shock and horror which I believe is universal. So what else do I feel?

I also feel awful for Germany. Civilized, advanced Germany. A modest and industrious people. Pioneers in mathematics, music, science and industry. Orderly to a fault but capable of such soaring passion as Beethoven's Ode To Joy.

Their national personality was unique. Their contributions to Western Civilization were perhaps rivaled but never surpassed.

Until, in a moment of weakness, an Austrian who was as brilliant as he was crazy plunged the nation to depths of depravity never before seen in human history.

Germany's legacy is reduced to that of a cautionary tale, it's accomplishments acknowledged but forever tarnished.

During the Nuremberg trials, Hans Frank was fairly certain he was to be executed. He was asked if he participated in the Holocaust. He signed his own death warrant thus,

I myself have never installed an extermination camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally has laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought against Jewry for years; and we have indulged in the most horrible utterances -- -- my own diary bears witness against me.
Therefore, it is no more than my duty to answer your question in this connection with "yes." A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

And it won't.

My name is German. My father spoke a few German words to me as a child. (We didn't go to sleep, we went schlaf.) I should like to visit Germany some day.

But I just can't.

Because of the dreams.


Sep 24, 2013

What made you finally decide to watch James Cameron's Avatar at a theatre?

By all accounts the visual effects were ground breaking. Cameron waited years until CGI technology caught up with his vision.

So I went to see it in IMAX.

The big screen is what Marshall Macluhan would call a "hot medium". It amplifies the experience.

I was not disappointed.


Sep 25, 2013

Why do you think women and men are still so attracted to each other and pursue each other even though more and more evidence is found about our brain and biology differences, and our constant miscommunication?

Of all people, Henry Kissinger put it best :

"There will never be a winner in the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternization with the enemy."


Sep 26, 2013

What are the possible reasons that my girlfriend denies me sex when I try to schedule it? My girlfriend won't agree to have sex with me if I inform her ahead of time unless I just call her and start romancing, then we make it!

Think of sex as a car.

Women own the keys.

You can't call ahead and order a rental at the airport.

Just show up and hope for a , um, ride.


Sep 26, 2013

Why do we use a dollar symbol ($) before variables in PHP?

It also speeds up parsing.

A big job of interpreters is to distinguish variables from keywords. Sometimes this takes some exotic patten matching, and even trial and error.

With a leading $, the interpreter can tell instantly. For an interpreted language, this performance boost can matter, and it simplifies the parser code.

Lots of early interpreted languages (Perl, BASIC) used a similar thing.

I would editorialize that this is The Wrong Thing and had been abandoned in modern language.

Once in a long while though, I'll pick a reserved word as a variable name though, and the interpret/compiler gags, and I think back to those dollar signs when we never had to worry about that.


Sep 26, 2013

What would you call a friend who is programming with you? A code buddy?

Brogrammer.


Sep 26, 2013

What is your opinion on the dog whisperer and his methods?

I have a bit of a beef with him.

He promotes the "Alpha dominance" theory of dogs. That dogs, like their wolf cousins, assort into packs. That the owner must assert themselves as the "alpha" through a number of techniques (ignoring the dog, snapping its leash, ne'er allowing it to walk ahead, and rolling it on its back [alpha roll]).

This theory has a small problem. It's been debunked for decades.

In the 1940's, Rudolph Schenkel studied wolves in captivity, not in the wild. He found the caged wolves act much like human prisoners - fighting for supremacy. He coined the term "alpha" in a paper published in 1947.

In 1970, another researcher named L. David Mech referred to Schenkel's "alpha" theory in his popular book, "The Wolf, Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species".

The "alpha" theory entered into common parlance.

The problem is it's all wrong. Schenkel only studied wolves in captivity. Wolves do not act like this in the wild. They assort into simple families, where youngsters follow the leads of their parents. The young are guided to adulthood with affection and care. This has been known for twenty years, announced and re-announced.

In this light, some of Caser Milan's tactics amount to jacking up a misbehaving child against the wall. Sure, it works. But it's abusive.

Mech himself says of his popular 1970 book,


I crafted my book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Speciesin the late 1960s. This book was a synthesis of available wolf information at the time, so I included much reference to Schenkel’s study. The book was timely because no other synthesis about the wolf had been written since 1944, so 'The Wolf' sold well. It was originally published in 1970 and republished in paperback in 1981 and is still in print. Over 120,000 copies are now in circulation. Most other general wolf books have relied considerably on 'The Wolf' for information, thus spreading the misinformation about alpha wolves far and wide." -- L. David Mech.


Information abounds debunking this theory, in both the scientific and popular press.

Wolf Status and Dominance in Packs -Alpha Status

Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong

Yet many - if not most - animal trainers still cling to the notion. People even apply it to humans. This idea just refuses to die, for some reason.

For the dogs Milan works with - who are often vicious and scheduled to be put down, perhaps his methods are forgivable as a last resort.

But his show serves to perpetuate a false theory which has millions of dog owners trying to play "alpha wolf", leaving the poor animal to wonder why Dad is so mean.


Sep 27, 2013

What features would make Quora better?

(Rewritten 5/2015.)

For fuck sake. In the name of the Greek pantheon, the Christian Triumverate, Moses and Mohammed (peace be upon him) :

One thing. Just one.

When someone promotes my stuff, i want to thank them. Right then and there. To not do so is a sharp faux pas.

When we get a promote, give us a Thank link right there in the notification. NOT A CLICK AWAY. Thank is pretty much the only response a person would want to make to a promote.

So. Put. The. Link. In. The. Notification.

Not just on the site. iPhone and android too (including ios 6.x).

It's one link. Give it to us. Hell, pay my airfare and I'll code it myself.

One click. Thank you. We all love you; get your shit together.


Sep 28, 2013

Why do we so much engage the old stories, with heroes and gods? Don't we live in a time when common sense and science affect our perceptions?

The triumph of science in the 20th century is hard to overstate. We have conquered disease, taken flight, connected our world and achieved countless other feats that would appear miraculous even two hundred years earlier.

We are not creatures of the 20th century. Our culture, language, and lore goes back thousands of years - before science, before writing. We have crossed glaciers, deserts and oceans. At times we clung to life, at others we flourished.

For all of science's achievements - it does little to illuminate the human experience - then and now. The tales we tell - literature, mythology, religion - try to do that. We all hail from the same ancestry, and our tales share similar themes no matter what language we speak or where we live .

Carl Jung used the word archeytpes to describe these enduring and universal themes. He even posited that humans possess a "racial memory" of everything that's happened to us, that it's all buried in our "collective unconscious" and surfaces in our mythology and literature.

This sounds to me a little far-fetched, but maybe there's something to it. Whether they are rooted in our past, or simply a universal part of the humanity, certain tales serve to inform our lives. They inspire us, they warn us, they commiserate with our struggles.

Here's a few themes, or archetypes.

The journey. A person or group takes a long, treacherous journey. In doing so, they seize their destiny.

From the Old Testament, Exodus :


From the New Testament : In the "Tempation of Christ", Jesus walks for 40 days in the desert :

We tell the tale of the transformative journey in modern times :


It speaks to our universal human desire to move, to find something else - to become something else. It may have been science that provided the propellant, but our tales that we uncover the desire to do this :


There are endless other archetypes which echo through time, in both truth and fiction :

We want to be loved :


Davey will rise to challenge Goliath :



There are demons to be feared.


Science tells us much, but the deepest truths about the human experience are to be found in our stories. We need both.

The Big Bang?


Or "Let there be light" ?


Sep 28, 2013

What is your memorable airport story?

This was my Facebook status 18 months ago :

"I just saw a man and a crying little boy, about 4, whisked through security without a ticket. An older girl, around 8, was taken off a plane that was already boarding in order to ... Hug her little brother good bye.

Not a dry eye at gate E27, in Denver Colorado, on a blue planet orbiting an average star in an otherwise unremarkable galaxy."


Sep 30, 2013

How do I solve the game of Nim?

This sounds strange, but write out the number of eggs in each basket in binary. Make a table where the each number is a row and their columns line up.

When it's your turn, pick a move that leaves an odd number of 1's in each (non zero) column.

This is called a 'safe' position in game theory. If you're in a 'safe' position, you are guaranteed that :

Your opponent can't move to a safe position.

No matter what your opponent does, you can.

You will win so long as you always move to another safe position.


For example, safe positions are :
1,5,4
1,4,3
1,1,1

This non-obvious solution eluded some early AI researchers, who used recursive descent to check all possible moves.

Note that you can memorize a small group of safe positions and split the baskets up into sub games, so that you can appear god-like to your opponent.

For example if we play a 9-basket game, and I leave you with 1,1,1,1,4,3,1,5,4 I know I will win the game because it's a combination of 3 safe positions.


Oct 3, 2013

Can a helicopter create the butterfly effect?

Yes, but that's overkill.

Merely pointing at the helicopter induces the butterfly effect.

The butterfly effect is the phenomenon where the slightest perturbation in the system drastically changes its global behavior sometime later.

The classic example is that the flap of a butterfly's wings can create - or prevent - a hurricane a month later. Chaotic systems have non linear feedback that make them super sensitive to slight changes.

Von Neumann once theorized that the climate had occasional moments of instability, so we can control the appearance of storms by placing a fan at the right place and time.

Later, Chaos Theory stated that every point in time and space is unstable. Every puff of air, everywhere, completely changes the weather a month from now.

We can't control the weather because we can't control the butterflies.


Oct 5, 2013

Why is Python being taught in US and Canadian universities rather than C or C++, even though it has disadvantages, e.g. being slow, not allowed on TopCoder for all div, and most companies (except startups) prefer C or C++ programmers?

Industry doesn't give a damn about the execution speed of code. (OK, overstatement, but true almost everywhere.)

This is what costs business money, time and lost opportunity :

Developing code.

Fixing bugs.

Bring new developers up to speed on a codebase.

Scaling code up.


This is what causes software to run slow :

Database look-ups.

Network/Internet latency.


For these things listed, C++ either does nothing to help or makes things much worse.


Oct 5, 2013

What is the noun form of sacred?

Sacrament is a possibility, though it usually refers to rites or rituals in the Christian tradition.


Oct 5, 2013

What uninvented technology would improve your life the most?

Tile.

*cough.

This startup got a big boost on kick starter for making little tags that you attach to stuff and can then track with an app (or something).

Some speculate it's vapor ware.


Oct 5, 2013

What is your review of Gravity (2013 movie)?

★★★★★

"I knew it was good. I didn't know it was gonna be THAT good."

That's what the guy behind me said when the lights came up.

I can't say much without spoiling the film. Others have written how beautifully rendered, acted and written it is.

SEMI-SPOILER ALERT
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This film has a transformative effect on the audience. After 90 minutes of suspense, and gasp-inducing scenes of beauty, the movie-goer is left feeling as if they themselves have just plummeted from space and are taking their first steps with a fresh perspective on simple human life.


Oct 6, 2013

What are the most effective and proven time management techniques?

Richard Feyman got curious where his time went and tried to account for every last minute.

He found he couldn't do it. The mere act of tracking took time itself and you end up in a weird meta-tracking loop.

More importantly, when we fully focus on something we lose sense of time. We don't work in minutes, hard mental work happens in units of days.

You may be trying to do too much at once - which leads to nothing. You may be over planning - there is uncertainty inherent in most tasks.

Sure, have a plan. But make it reasonable. If a task must slip - make sure it's the least important one. Make it flexible. (E.g., this will take 2-4 hours, depending).

Allow for down time. Your mind needs time to rest and assimilate. Every programmer, for example, has banged their head for hours against a problem, given up and walked away. The solution occurs to them the next morning and they solve the problem in five minutes.

The Internet can also be distracting as he'll. Here's a life hack : while working, keep your phone next to your laptop. During micro breaks, access social media (Quora, Facebook, etc) through your phone. The increased friction of mobile keeps you from getting sucked in.


Oct 6, 2013

What symbolism can found in the film Gravity (2013)?

The theme of (re-)birth is clear. Here we see Dr Ryan Stone, after a desperate race to the safety of a space-pod, floating in the fetal position. A nearby hose falls perfectly into place to play the role of umbilical cord :


SPOILER ALERT
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We see her (re)birth, emerging nearly naked from the water, taking her first feeble steps :

[spoiler picture not yet available.]

Upon emerging from the lake, she looks to the sky and sees the flaming debris of the spacecraft streaking across the sky.


Now when Solomon had made an end of praying, the fire came down from heaven, and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the Lord filled the house. -- (King James) Bible, 2 Chronicles 7

Oct 6, 2013

Why do so many computer programmers want to work for startups or found startups when the probability of getting rich is much higher when you're working for a big tech company?

Big companies actually take care to pay well, but not well enough that you'll leave. The most successful companies (Facebook, Google) actually pay near or under the industry median, because the name alone is incentive.

But what about the stock options, you might object? Those were obtained when the company was still a smallish startup.

The real question may be, why do so many people eschew the security of a big company for the risk of a startup which - forget getting rich - might not be able to pay them at all in a year.

OK. Experiment : Go to a public rest room. I'm serious. They are always lit with fluorescent lighting.

Have a seat. Good morning. Here's 1.2 million lines of code. Here's a bug report.

Don't worry, your eyes adjust to the flickering. It's bug number 2574, medium priority.

Please update JIRA and Bugzilla with your progress.

If can close this, and a hundred more like it, you might get a window (tho the flickering is just fine). And you'll get to track the progress of 5 other bug closers.

Welcome to the machine. We pay well.


Oct 6, 2013

What is the funniest joke you've ever heard or read?

The bartender says, "we don't serve super luminal particles here."

A tachyon walks into a bar.


Oct 6, 2013

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Stop dropping acid.


Oct 7, 2013

How was Steve Jobs sure that his team could refine the iPhone to the point of usability, when in fact the initial prototype unit unveiled to the public was highly unstable?

He probably wasn't. Apple had its technical failures in the past (Apple III, MobileMe, and others.)

But as Marc Bodnick points out, new products are almost always glitchy at the demo stage.

If they still have issues at launch, Jobs basically fires everybody and reboots.

For the most part, Apple has some of the most dedicated and talented engineers in the world. If something just turns out to be badly engineered, Jobs could drop other people in to make it right.


Oct 9, 2013

U.S. Manners & Etiquette: Why do Americans dislike being called "Sir"?

It's about blue jeans, that most iconic piece of American apparel :


America has a strong anti-classist bent to it. It always has. Our early founders were people who rebelled against class-conscious Great Britain (and Europe.) Farmers who defied a king.

Jeans were designed for miners. They will protect against scrapes, won't tear or get caught on sharp edges. They provide warmth but also breathe.

I once read (I can't find the author) that the widespread adoption of bluejeans in America is 'class tranvestitism'. America flips the bird to class distinctions, and would rather be seen in miner's clothes than in a suit and tie.

We don't call our employer Sir or Mr. First names are de rigeur in American business.

'Sir' is only heard when a cop pulls you over, or perhaps by staff at a store or restaurant. Or we may use it light-heartedly with each other.


Oct 12, 2013

What is the consensus on chamomile tea as a sleeping aid?

I keep a vial of chamomile extract in my bag. I'm not new-agey at all, but I find it takes the edge off stress and can help me fall asleep.

In the last few years, a number of clinical trials have found chamomile effective against moderate anxiety in many people :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19593179

I'm not aware of any studies specifically of chamomile as a sleep aid, but it's not too much of a stretch that a less anxious person will sleep better.


Oct 12, 2013

How did your socio-economic status influence what type and amount of complimentary alcoholic beverage was served at your typical high school and college party?

Keg beer. Everywhere. Always.

There isn't a socio-economic status in college - everyone is just "student".

In grad school and certain enclaves like Harvard's final clubs, things change. But for 99.999% of college kids, it's kegs of stuff like Bud.


Oct 12, 2013

Why is vim so much better than gedit for manipulating large text files (>500 MB)?

VIM is based on VI, which has always been able to edit massive files.

VI was built in the days of meager RAM, so the ability to page in and out from disk was baked in early on. VI won't try to load the whole file at once, but just grab a slice of it.

Later graphical editors traded this ability for instant response time, and try to scoop up the whole file into RAM. For huge files (admittedly, a rare use-case), this brings the whole system to a crawl.


Oct 12, 2013

What, in your opinion, is the most beautiful perfume bottle?

Oh. Sure. It's a few blocks over. Let's take a walk.


Feel free to admire my motor scooter. Moving along ....


We get a lot of tourists here is Salem, MA as Halloween approaches. But we're also blessed by the Peabody Essex Museum ....

Second floor, almost there. Art Deco exhibit ...

Here it is :


Thanks for the walk.


Oct 12, 2013

Did a supreme being create the universe?

I think you're refusing to accept the notion of finite time.

Like the notion of finite space, we are tempted to ask, "what's one meter past the end?". The question smuggles in the refusal to accept the idea.

But in the case of finite space, the question offers an experiment : go as far as you can and keep going.

For space, the answer is that you loop back to where you started (in one proposed topology, anyway.)

So fair enough to ask about space.

As for time before the Big Bang, things get tougher. What experiment can you perform at 1 second past to explore the cosmos 2 seconds prior? And in what cosmos would you perform it?

The Big Bang theory proposes that one second prior, there was nothing. No space, no time, no causes.

The Big Bang is the first thing to ever happen. No eternity stretches behind it, and no cosmos existed to hold a cause.


Oct 12, 2013

How do I install the Google plugin for Eclipse under Ubuntu without having dependency issues?

Enable the official plugin repository in Eclipse, by clicking "Help" -> "Install New Software..." -> "Available Software Sites" and enabling the entry whose location is "http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios"

Return back to "Help" -> "Install New Software...", search for "xml" and install "Eclipse XML Editors and Tools". Of course, don't forget to restart Eclipse afterwards.

Go on and install Google Plugin for Eclipse as described over here.


-- http://blog.tomtasche.at/2012/02/installing-google-plugin-for-eclipse-on.html?m=1


Oct 13, 2013

Is a Mac or Windows better for a CS student?

It's the damnedest thing.

I'm old, my first job was in 1990. Sun workstations were just appearing. Networked together, their combined computing power could outpace a VAX "mainframe", which was tended to like a nuclear reactor by guys you needed an appointment to talk to.

"VAX Mainframe. Access code required to enter."

We didn't like talking to them, so we worked on the Suns. We learned UNIX. Simple, cryptic, flexible UNIX.

A Sun, but not a Sun "pizza box." (A Sun pizza box looks like a pizza box.)


The VI editor was so counterintuitive it was laughable (compared to editors like TECO) on the VAX. But we *really* didn't like begging more disk-space from the reactor-dudes, so escape-colon became as natural as blinking.

Words like grep (search) became a regular part of conversation. "Dude, grep for more coffee filters".

We thought all this was *transitional*.
This OS was surely just a step in evolution. New things were bound to replace it soon.

Microsoft exploded into the business world over the next few years. Business ran on Microsoft. Games ran on Microsoft. If you were trying to make a living coding - outside of academe - you were based on DOS.

Meanwhile, a little science project called Linux - of interest to geeks mainly - offered a free and open source version of Unix for a PC.

Steve Jobs had been kicked out of Apple and had built a machine called NeXT. It was based on Unix.

It's 1996 and Unix is quietly lurking in the background of Microsoft, like the Visigoths circling Ancient Rome.

Steve resurrects Apple. Running on a Unix core.

The Web makes an unpredicted turn into mainstream culture, fueling a speculation boom in the stock market.

Linux offers a fast and free web server. It's more stable than MS offerings.

The barbarians are now past the gates.

Today, Unix powers almost 70% of the Web Server market. The first thing a startup does is set up an Apache server with a MySql database. At a cost of nothing.

As a developer, that's your target. A Unix command line.

So ... What machine do you use? A Mac. So you can drop to a unix command line and closely emulate your target server.

If you have an Intel box, you'll install Ubuntu and have a perfect mirror of your server (at the cost of certain business tools like GoTo meeting.)

23 years later, and it's all about grep. I never imagined those bizarre VI keystrokes would still be relevant.


Oct 13, 2013

If Quora had advertisements, what kind of ads would be appropriate?

Being topic- rather than people- based, I believe Quora has a huge opportunity in advertising. I'm quite sure the Quora team realizes this. I expect they are focussed on growing their user-base, forming the right kind of partnerships and technologies (similar to Google Ad Words) before they pull the trigger.

When I'm in the movies topic, they can serve up movie ads. When I'm in the motor scooter topic, they can offer up scooter-ads.

When I ask a question "What are good headphones for under 50 dollars" - hell, that's is downright pleading for an ad.

Quora has a better understanding of its users needs and interests than any other site on earth, I believe. A content-focused ad engine will make advertising assistive rather than intrusive.

Quora : Bring on the ads.


Oct 13, 2013

Why do FORTRAN and COBOL use capital letter for the commands which is so hard to read?

The original monitors were monochrome.

So uppercase was used to distinguish keywords from variables (now called syntax highlighting).


Oct 13, 2013

Who is the weirdest couple you have ever seen or met in your life? Either the relationship or the people themselves. And if you are close to this couple, is their relationship secure and do you think it will last?

I've got to go with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. A brilliant, controversial philosopher whose nervous tics (like tugging on his shirt) are almost as famous as his provocative writings :




The dude looks recently exhumed.

He married fashion model Analia Hounie,


Which just goes to show ... something. I don't know what. You figure it out.


Oct 13, 2013

If we blame religion for the Salem Witch trials, are we thus logically obligated to blame it for 9/11 as well?

Sure.

Tho really, mass hysteria, group-think, and an intolerance of divergent opinions are the real underlying reasons IMO.

Stalin and Hitler did fine without God.


Oct 13, 2013

Why do people insist AGW is a slam-dunk when they can't explain it?

This topic has been politicized beyond hope of scientific discourse.

Scientists supporting anthropogenic climate change get further funding, so they write more papers. So more papers get written in support of it.

Many scientists have dissented from IPCC reports—even within IPCC itself. They are branded as crackpots, probably on the take from Big Oil.

Basically people talk about the percentage of scientists who support it (I've never heard scientists *polled* before), about oil-backed lobby groups trying to cast doubt.

The bottom line is this: We don't have an accurate model of the Earth's climate. We're not really sure how ice ages get started. Mankind's contribution of CO2 gases is a tiny percentage of global warming gasses. The argument of "tipping points" doesn't even have a suggested model behind it to support it.

And no one discusses the possibility—at all—that we are indeed in a period of climate change which is simply part of the earth's natural cycle. Which—again —we cannot model.

This issue has been politicized beyond the tolerance for dissent or rational discussion.

To editorialize a bit: It does seem that the earth is getting hotter and an ice age is around the corner. It doesn't matter at all how much petroleum or coal we burn because we'll burn through this stuff in the next century or two (Peak oil).

The irony is this: For the first time in human history we can see an ice age coming. But we're so obsessed with blaming ourselves and trying to slow down our oil consumption (which will run out all by itself, thank you). that we're not addressing the problem of:

* How do we prepare for the next ice age?
* How do we feed people when the petroleum runs out?
* How do we prevent mass starvation and war when the climate shifts?
* How do we preserve human civilization through the next, long winter?
* How big should our population be?

The warm periods on earth generally last about 10,000 years, and then 100,000 years of cold.


Everywhere there's not a spike... New York City is under a mile of ice.

So warm periods last about 10,000 years. Well... it's been 10,000 years. Look at the blue line. Guess what happens next?

We're solving the wrong problem.


Oct 13, 2013

What English expressions do you dislike the most?

"I shouldn't say this but ..."

I have never seen this go well.


Oct 14, 2013

What was the Vietnam War?

It was a terribly misguided incident of American paranoia.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara convinced the Johnson Administration that North Vietnam was a pawn of the People's Republic of China, which was itself under control of the Soviet Union.

America was obsessed with maps with spreading regions of red; the expansion of Soviet Communism.

What the USA failed to understand - which McNamara later admitted, was that Chinese Communism was independent from Soviet Communism and posed no threat to the United States. And Vietnamese communism was itself different than Chinese communism.

This became painfully clear when, immediately after defeating the US, Vietnam went to war with China.

McNamara basically had a nervous breakdown over his mistake and later wrote freely about it.

Robert McNamara resignation speech, 1967. The Vietnam War, which he largely architected, has gone terribly awry. His voice cracking, on the verge of tears, he abruptly states that "I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today, and I think I'd better respond on another occasion."


Oct 15, 2013

How do U.S. political tensions in the early 2010s compare to those of the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Not even a close comparison.

I was just a kid growing up on the Connecticut College campus in the early seventies but I was aware that :

Students were openly calling for the overthrow of the US government.

The president was called "Pig" and resigned in disgrace.

Riots had occurred in almost every major city over racial tensions and civil rights.


In short, the union had come closer to unravelling than at any time since the civil war.

It was also the best possible time to be alive. The air was electric with rebellion and possibility.

"All power to the imagination!" proclaimed our French counterparts. Maybe it seemed magical because I was a precocious eight years old.

Or maybe it really was.


Oct 16, 2013

Why would a government-run single-payer health care system be better than one that relies on the free market?

Simply put, if we leave health care to pure market forces : poor people die.

Including orphans, the elderly.

Force hospitals to treat life-threatening conditions (which we do), you say?

So much for free market.

Of course, it's cheaper to catch that tumor early than a whole treatment program of chemotherapy. So let's get those poor people some checkups.

And so on.

There is a principal here which is moral, not transactional. We don't let our fellow man die just because he's broke.
Anymore than we let him die of hunger or thirst.

These are moral imperatives that over-ride the right to private property.

I will steal bread from your table to feed a starving child. The government will seize part of your income so poor people don't die.

A majority of Americans desire this. It's the kind of country we want.

And as others have pointed out, the free market is not efficiently allocating health care. We've got the most expensive health care in the world.


Oct 17, 2013

If you bought a study or desk lamp, what would be the perfect free gift to go with it, other than a spare bulb for the lamp?

There are these little solar powered keychains that act as flashlights. They're five bucks retail, you can probably get then for 2 in bulk.

Your lamp charges them up, and the buyer can carry the light with them!


Oct 17, 2013

What are some of the complex and useful C programs?

Linux.


Oct 17, 2013

How do you feel about paying federal government workers for 16 days of work they weren't allowed to do?

Not only am I totally cool with that, I'd like to see a law passed that docks congressmen's pay one month for every day of a shutdown.

There have been 18 shutdowns since 1976. It's become a routine political tool, a mega filibuster.

It harms the families of federal workers and needs to stop.


Oct 17, 2013

How is the United States of America going to survive the self-fulfilling conflicts within its government?

Dude. Chill.

There was a fight over health care. For a couple of weeks.

When I was a kid, one president refused to run again and the next one resigned as he was about to be impeached. America was bogged down in a senseless and losing war in Vietnam that kids were being DRAFTED into.

Nixon didn't have to run against RFK because he was shot dead. Like his brother. And MLK.

The US and the Soviets were caught in a hair-trigger nuclear standoff. One slip and hydrogen bombs could render the globe lifeless.

While I disagree with the shutdown, a two week squabble over health care is not a harbinger of doom - it's pretty small change. The bickering and discord you decry is the sign of a thriving democracy.

Which we are.


Oct 17, 2013

Who are the top ten game programmers from the start of video-game history to the modern day? Why?

It probably starts with this guy - Bill Budge :

(then - 1983) :


Now - (lookin' good, Bill!)


He was a programmer rock star for writing two very popular games for the Apple II (eventually ported), Raster Blaster and Pinball Construction Set.

Raster Blaster (1981) emulated a pinball machine - very, very well on some pretty anemic hardware.

His next hit - Pinball Construction Set (1983), enabled you to design your own pinball game and play it :

If these games look crude, let me remind you of the hardware specs of the
Apple II :

CPU speed : 1 Megahertz.
Memory : 0.046 MB (46KB. Maxed out.)
Video resolution : 280x192, 4 colors.
Graphics coprocessor : Hell no.

Bill Budge was famous among programmers in his day for his insane ability to write tight, fast assembly code. He set the standard for anybody trying to write games : code right on the chip, optimize, optimize, optimize. It's gotta pop and sing.

EDIT : Please see Joe Wezorek's comment - Budge introduced a graphical interface prior to the launch of Mac's GUI ...


Oct 17, 2013

Do you have to pay to run an Ubuntu Server?

Nope - it's free as in beer.

Got one running on my laptop right now.

Whether you want to rent some hardware or virtual machine somewhere is a separate question.


Oct 28, 2013

What is the scientific explanation for consciousness/awareness? Could we create a self-aware Android?

We basically got nothing.

We can emulate very narrow aspects of consciousness (Hi Siri!). Things like speech or image recognition.

But we can't light the spark of consciousness.

There are some who claim that consciousness doesn't exist. It's just an attribute of brains : it's what brains do. Brains just do stuff that's so cool we invent terms like 'sentience', when we're really just super impressed.

I find this view bizarre. For me, Descartes exploded this view when he proclaimed Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am.)

Descartes argued - convincingly to me - that not only is our sentience a fact, it is the ONLY fact of which we are perfectly certain.

So I believe sentience exists as a unique and irreducible property of the universe.

Can we copy it with a super-clever machine?

Maybe, someday. But I don't think so.

Because there's a ghost in the machine.


Oct 30, 2013

What are some of the coolest things you can do with PHP?

Write a python intererpreter.


Nov 3, 2013

Why is the moon unable to support life and an environment like on earth?

The moon lacks the gravity to hold an atmosphere.


Nov 7, 2013

Mind is a multi-dimensional space element, why science is not researching on mind (mathematical and physics model of mind) to understand higher dimension-space? sub question : please explain physics and mathematical model of mind ?

I think you're using the word 'dimension' in a non mathematical way. Our minds are pretty multifaceted and mysterious but as far as we know they occupy the same dimensions as other objects. Knowledge of the mind is not likely to inform physics.

There is, however, enormous research studying how the brain works. From neural networks to cognitive science, we've been hard at work on this problem for decades.

The results of this work are all around you. Whenever you do a google search, a natural language parser (NLP) fires off to try to figure out you meant.

Do a google IMAGE (you upload and image and it tries to hunt down) and sorts of algorithms set in motion. They developed in part by studying the optic processing.

Some years ago, a supercomputer called Deep Blue defeated the world chess master Gary Kasporov (who kind of freaked out.)

Progress has been slow, though. When the DNA helix was discovered in 1952, there was hope that a similar, simple form may underly human intelligence.

It didn't work out that way and progress has been in inches, no breakthroughs or Eureka.

We don't understand the brain. We're trying to.

You way want to ask again in 300 years.


Nov 7, 2013

Why do people on Quora answer questions that ask for personal accounts when they don't have the relevant experience to do so?

The great thing about Quora is that people answer when they feel they have some personal experience or perspective to uniquely offer.

Ask a legit question about Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales himself just might answer.

It's not really a place where people google stuff for you, or guess, or make common sense conjecture.


Nov 7, 2013

Why are we still learning assembly level programming when there are many high level languages?

It's the same reason we learn arithmetic before calculus. No, you'll probably never use it.

But the foundation will be there - you'll understand NUMBER and your brain will make a thousand secret connections.

So it is with assembly. Ideas which baffle others will come easily to you. "What's a pointer?". Easy - it's a memory address, page 1 of assembly.

These fundamentals form the basis of deep intuition as you explore the higher ground of OOP, functional languages, etc.

Totally worth it. It's also pretty fun.


Nov 8, 2013

What frugal tips would you give to an international student moving to the US?

Avoid phone contracts. You can get a monthly SIM card for 30-50 a month and a used iPhone for 200 or so. The initial outlay of cash will pay for itself in two months.

Buy a used laptop. Many reputable shops sell them with warrantee.

Everybody loves to shop. Especially coming to a new country.. But you don't have to buy anything. Just "window shop" and if you really like something, you can get it online for much less money.

If you drink, stay out of bars. Pabst Blue Ribbon at home with friends is what the cool kids do anyway.

While the Salvation Army sounds awful, they often carry used clothing in excellent condition. They're also popular with students these days.

Sometime ordering food out is a well-deserved break. Develop a taste for Mexican food. A burrito costs 7 bucks and is really two meals in one.

Ask other students for other tips. Don't be ashamed. You are entering America during a bad recession and young people are rejecting consumerism. Making do with less is becoming fashionable.


Welcome to America.


Nov 8, 2013

Is that true that e-cigarettes are dangerously unregulated?

This is straight up link-bait, which is beneath HuffPo.

Regulate them? Sure. Dangerous? Absurd.

E-cigs contain propylene glycol (or vegetable glycerin), some nicotine and flavoring. And nothing else. Propylene glycol is the propellant in asthma inhalers,

A burning cigarette releases 4,000 compounds, 69 of which are known to be carcinogens. Sure, we know what smoking tobacco does. It kills people.

Let's investigate ecigs further. Let's keep them away from kids. But let some doctors chime in :

"As of April 2010, The American Association of Public Health Physicians (AAPHP) supports electronic cigarettes sales to adults "because the possibility exists to save the lives of four million of the eight million current adult American smokers who will otherwise die of a tobacco-related illness over the next twenty years." However, the AAPHP is against sales to minors.[31] The AAPHP recommends that the FDA reclassify the electronic cigarette as a tobacco product (as opposed to a drug/device combination)"


From the Boston University School of Public Health,

"The FDA and major anti-smoking groups keep saying that we don't know anything about what is in electronic cigarettes, the truth is, we know a lot more about what's in electronic cigarettes than what's in traditional cigarettes." -- Dr. Michael Siegel is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health. He has 25 years of experience in the field of tobacco control. He previously spent two years working at the Office on Smoking and Health at CDC.

A recent report in the British Journal Lancet found that e-cigs is the most effective smoking cessation aid to date. (Looking for source.).

Dangerous? No. Should it be regulated and go through FDA approval?Certainly. While some dubious products emerge from China, here in the USA "e-juice" producers are already preparing their product under clinical conditions with outside auditors in anticipation of FDA approval. Here's the lab of Johnson Creek Smoke Juice in Wisconsin :


So. If the patch and the gum doesn't work for you, this is worth your consideration. Buy from a place like Johnson Creek with strict quality control. Danger averted,

Let's stop the fear-mongering with words like Dangerous in headlines,

I have no vested interest in any e-cig firm except that smoking killed my Dad at an early age.

Shame on you, HuffPo.


Nov 8, 2013

Who invented SMTP (email)?

Strangely, I met him. SMTP grew out of ARPANET and BBN in Cambridge, and it was Ray Tomlinson at BBN who really put it together (he put the @ sign in email.). I was aquainted with him there, in 1996.

He said to me, "I still have yet to meet somebody with an at-sign in their name."

I gave him a floor lamp when I left.

Hi Ray, if you're out there.. I never did meet anyone with an at-sign in there name, either,.


Nov 12, 2013

What is "purposeful wandering"?

As JRR Tolkien wrote, "not all who wander are lost".

Those who wonder purposefully are seeking to discover the surprise over the next hill or around the next corner.

Typically we travel from a known origin to a known destination.

The purpose of wandering is to reach an unknown place, or meet unknown people.

To explore.


Nov 12, 2013

To what degree is President Obama's race an unmentioned reason for the extreme partisan bickering going on now?

This is politics as usual.

After calling each other every name imaginable and accusing each other of bringing America straight down to hell, these politicians go out and have dinner together.

Their goal is to advance their party's agenda and advance their own political careers.

Race just isn't relevant. Not because everyone's heart is rid of racism. But because politics is a game, and concerning yourself with race is taking your eyes off the ball.


Nov 12, 2013

Humiliation: I am ashamed of myself, my behaviour in the past. I can't focus and I am not sure whether I can recall what I studied or not. what do I do to be normal?

Your shame sounds ... out of perspective. That your only crime is becoming very anxious during exam time and insomnia.

Your school probably offers free professional psychiatric services. Go. Go today. They really can help. You've suffered enough.


Nov 12, 2013

Should fast food workers in the U.S. get $15.00/hr?

As Joe Germacelli calculated for us, the fast food industry doesn't have the profit to cover this wage increase.

If wages climbed to $15 an hour,

Prices would rise dramatically.

Business would drop off as a result.

Massive layoffs would ensue.

Fast food would invest in automating these jobs. If a robot can build a car it can sure as hell make a cheeseburger.


Wages would go from $15/hr to zero as the fast food industry moves on without these employees.

This attempt is trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Instead, I support the federal government providing free training and education to get these people into higher paying jobs.

The fast food industry should be required to provide the schedule flexibility to allow them to do this.


Nov 12, 2013

I'm an Indian who frequently uses the word "nigga" to refer to his close friends. It's almost a habit. Next year, I'll be joining an American university. Would this invite a lot of trouble?

To add to what other's have said, remember that America was home to centuries of slavery.

That word evokes the dehumanization and brutalizing of innocent people who were considered property. A bitter Civil War was fought to end it. We still haven't healed as a nation, north and south, black and white.

There is so much pain in that word that is never spoken. Even when speaking ABOUT it, we say the "n-word." It's the single most offensive word in our culture.

Not only will African Americans be shocked and offended, but whites will shun you and consider you racist.

Yes, you may hear African Americans use it themselves sometimes. That's complicated, it's sort of payback for oppression. It's use within the black community is hotly disputed.

Lose that habit before entering our borders.


Nov 13, 2013

What type of learner are you: visual, auditory or tactile and kinesthetic (learn by doing)?

Visual.

It's impossible for me to learn in a lecture setting.

Which caused some difficulty when I was a student :)


Nov 15, 2013

What is a true personal story that people have a hard time believing?

I was motoring around the Thames River in New London, Connecticut in a very small boat, a tiny Boston Whaler. I was 15 years old.

The kind of little "Whaler" I was in that day.

As I puttered around, I waved to other boats but nobody waved back. I realized that people on yachts and such do not wave to such lowly vessels as mine.

Feeling a little depressed, I headed out into the harbor. The sea began to swell in front of me. Was it a whale or what?

A massive object broke the surface - it was a Trident nuclear submarine. I hurried to get out of its way, and turn towards its wake.

A Trident nuke sub surfacing.

There was a man on deck. I wanted to wave, despite the small-boat snobbery I had discovered.

I reluctantly put my hand halfway up.

The man stared at me a second, stiffened his posture and saluted.

As I puttered back to shore, amidst the snooty yachts, I was no longer bothered they thought me unworthy of hello.

I had just been saluted by a Trident Nuclear Submarine. Probably the commander.

* Photos of course are just illustrative, this was 31 years ago before everybody had a camera on them.


Nov 16, 2013

What is an e-cigarette?

To counter Sajan Napit 's answer a bit, an e-cig is a nicotine delivery system that delivers vaporized liquid, not smoke. A battery heats a coil which vaporizes a fluid which is either propylene glycol and/or vegetable glycerin plus nicotine and flavoring.

It is much less unhealthy than cigarettes but is not entirely without risk of health problems. Using e-cigs carry a risk of

Nicotine addiction (certainly).

Slight cancer risk due to trace of TSNA's (Tobacco-specific nitrosamines). The risk here is typically equivalent to that of other nicotine substitutes like gum and lozenges.

Careless manufacturers may produce coils that give off metal particles


So - e-cigs may be appropriate for harm-reduction for tobacco smokers and a pathway to quitting, provided they buy from reputable companies. E-cigs should absolutely be avoided by non smokers because of the almost certain outcome of nicotine addiction, which may end up a pathway to smoking tobacco.


Nov 20, 2013

How deserved is JFK's reputation for civil rights advancement?

Not much credit goes to Kennedy on this issue, especially since he was assassinated before he had to chance to execute it.

Civil rights was a central issue during the 1960 election, and 70% of black voters backed Kennedy. But Kennedy still won by a very narrow margin, and there was a deeply divided house and senate. Kennedy made some beautiful speeches but was unable to move much on the civil rights front.

He delegated much of the civil right's agenda : His brother Bobby Kennedy brought suits against southern states for obstructing voting rights, and his Vice President Lyndon Johnson was put in charge of Equal Opportunity Employment.

Progress was minimal during his presidency.

The proper credit for the major gains of the 1960's civil rights movement goes to Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson knew how to go into a roomful of southerners (being a Texan himself) and get them on board with the agenda. He was a master wheeler-dealer of politics ("If you don't pass this bill, you'll get something worse!"). He would call congressman at home. If the congressman wasn't home, he'd talk to the spouse. Or even the kids.

In this way, Johnson passed two major laws which comprise the major gains of the Civil Rights Movement : The 1964 Civil Rights act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The first ended segregation in public places (and cut off federal funding to segregated schools.) The second ended the obstructions to vote that southern states used to disenfranchise blacks (like a Poll tax, taking a test, etc.)

Johnson isn't much remembered for this. He said at the end of his presidency, "They won't remember my work on civil rights, or The Great Society [Head Start, Medicare, NEA and many others.] Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam - they'll be shoving Vietnam up my ass every time."

As Vietnam fell apart, Martin Luther King was assasinated and riots broke out in many cities across America, Johnson simply refused to run again and retired from politics.


Nov 21, 2013

If I buy a computer that comes pre-installed with Windows 8, is there any way I can install Ubuntu and let the same Windows 8 to be run in a virtual machine instead, or will I have to buy a new license?

EDIT : Please see the comment by User warning that this might not work :


It's much easier to install Ubuntu as 'dual boot'. It keeps your windows partition (constrained to less hard drive space) and installs Ubuntu alongside it.

All your windows programs and settings are intact.

The Ubuntu installer will detect your windows partition and present you this option, then take care of it automagically.

When you power up, you are presented with a choice for Windows or Ubuntu.

I've done it dozens if times and it's very safe. It avoids any licensing issues; in fact Windows is entirely unaware that another OS is on your drive.


Nov 21, 2013

I have recently started smoking black cigarettes, and I like it. I smoke one daily. What should I do to not let this become a habit? I don't want to be a smoker.

You're taking your first baby steps as an addicted smoker. You're smoking daily, even though you don't want to. Cancer, emphysema, heart disease, impotence lie down the road. And nobody wants to kiss a smoker. And you age faster in appearance.

The crossroads you find yourself at is a medical emergency. I'm very glad you're addressing it now, when it's not too hard to manage.

Some practical suggestions from someone who smoked for 30 years.

Stop. Yes, just freaking stop.

If you find yourself smoking anyway - recognize that you are engaged in addictive behavior : doing something against your own will.

In this case, observe how your brain is talking you into it. This is called the 'Addictive Voice'. It will say things like, "it's just one!" or "you're in a bad mood!" Write these down and prepare responses for them. Or, try a 'Stop Thought' - just yell at the voice, swear at it. This is all from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

If you slip and have one, throw the rest of the pack away immediately.

Stop. Stop now.


Nov 21, 2013

What are your best everyday life, home hacks for personal electronics devices?

Get yourself a backup battery supply for your smart phone.

Not because you need extra power, but so your phone is never tethered to anything stationary.

The battery gets tethered, the phone never does.


Nov 21, 2013

How and why did Nixon "open" China to relations with the US?

To add to the excellent answers explaining "how", let me add to the "why".

Henry Kissinger's role in opening relations to China was pivotal. Kissinger had a theory of 'triangular diplomacy'. During the Cold War, NATO was confronted with a massive, nuclear-armed, communist 'bloc' of both the Soviet Union and China. The combined population of these two adversaries was 1 Billion - four times that of the United States.

Kissinger's plan was to break the bloc in half. By negotiating separately with China - he could get both the Soviets and Chinese to compete for better terms and generate distrust between the two nations.

Kissinger was also somewhat of a global political celebrity that people wanted to meet. He joined Nixon on his first visit to Mao Tse Tung. Kissinger asked Mao how it felt to have his writings change the world.

Mao responded through his interpreter, "Bullshit. How does a fat man get so many girls?"


Nov 22, 2013

Why is the media so negative?

Imagine two Early Humans. Each wants to cross a plain.

One is kind of mellow, and just strolls across.

The other is hyper-vigilant. He climbs a tree and looks for tigers and other predators. He scans for carcasses and other signs that such dangerous beasts are around. He sharpens a stick to at least have a fighting chance should the worst happen. He brings his brother so they can both fight back.

The mellow humanoid is tiger-food.

The second is your ancestor because he survives.

Humans have a deeply engrained interest in danger. The media exploits that to profitable effect.

They bring a tiger into your living room.


Nov 23, 2013

Do you guys really think that Facebook is ruining our lives or is it smartphones?

What's all this?

Maybe I'm a bit older, but I use Facebook about 20 min per day, almost entirely on my phone.

I use it to make small announcements, tell friends where I am, share news articles I think may be of interest, and share photos. (It have also reconnected with old friends from college and high school.)

I scan the same type of content from my FB friends.

Instead of a media corporation serving up my morning dose of information and entertainment, now it is presented by my friends.

I honestly can't imagine what people who spend hours on FB are actually *doing*.

Is this a generational thing? <- non rhetorical question, I was born in '66.

Now Quora I spend loads of time on, but I'm writing, so consider that productive.


Nov 25, 2013

What's the most frightening weather-related situation you have faced?

Not a single event, but most people my age (40+) have observed what's sometimes called "global weirding". The weather does stuff it didn't do when we were kids.

We see hail in the summer, a New Year's Day in the fifties.

But these are just examples : I'm not talking about science or statistics, just intuition. The weather *feels* different than it did 20 years ago.

Every older person I've asked says the same thing. Climate change certainly *feels* real.


Nov 25, 2013

What do you think of the cost of e-cigarettes?

A rechargeable, refillable e-cig costs $1 per day for me to use, compared to $10 for a pack of cigarettes here in Massachusetts.

The initial investment is $40.

So the savings is huge, a factor of 10.


Nov 26, 2013

What are ways to reduce one's sensitivity to caffeine?

Certainly - if you drink more despite the symptoms you will almost certainly build a tolerance.

But - don't. Listen to your body. If something causes you unpleasant symptoms, that is a message from your body saying - "Hey! Pretty complex system going here ... you're messing it up."

If it's energy you're seeking - exercise actually works better. So does eating an apple or an orange.

If you just want a hot beverage, there's lots of great herbal teas and decaf coffees.

Also, you may not need to go caffeine-free; you may just be super-sensitive. So dose way the hell down. Mix decaf tea with caffeinated until you find a mix which doesn't cause you discomfort.


Nov 26, 2013

Where or at what point do you think science needs to be stopped from going forward?

Never.

Science has done more good than harm. The whole cosmos awaits exploration. We may even find sentient friends out there.

Science will preserve civilization through the next ice age which (thanks to science) we know is coming.

Science may help us avert a mass extinction event like a meteor strike.

For some reason, the cosmos created a curious little monkey with an amazing capacity to learn, experiment, theorize, and discover.

Stopping scientific progress would be, in my opinion, unnatural, harmful and wasteful.

It would be tragic.


Nov 27, 2013

How can I support my sibling, who has severe anxiety, without agitating him?

Persistent and acute anxiety can be a symptom of a (mild) psychiatric disorder. It is perhaps the most treatable condition one can have.

I would urge them to go to a psychiatrist.


Nov 28, 2013

What is the best JavaScript IDE?

WebStorm is probably your best bet here : The best JavaScript IDE with HTML Editor for Web development


Nov 28, 2013

The technology, science and engineering solutions exist to solve (or substantially improve) some of the large problems in the world (energy, food, water), what are the main reasons they are not implemented?

Capitalism.


Nov 28, 2013

Why do some people feel ashamed about the Holocaust, but not about the genocide of the Native Americans?

To add to the other excellent answers here,

We've got to take into account the role of smallpox among the Native Americans. Smallpox ravaged the native population of the Americas due to the fact that people here had no exposure - hence no immunity - to it.

Hard numbers are difficult to obtain (and may not exist at all.) But we do have a few examples.

Ten years after Cortez arrived in Mexico, the native population had been reduced from 25 million to 6.5 million due to the disease.


In June of 1837, smallpox broke out amongst the Mandan, Blackfeet, and the Assiniboine nations. The mortality rate was recorded at 98%.


Smallpox reduced the Mandan nation from 1,600 people to 31.

These are just two examples. At death rates this high, societies crumble. The best hunters are gone, along with the weapons-crafters. Wise leaders disappear; relations among tribes evaporate as trusted diplomats no longer exist.

In the face of often brutal European expansion, the native peoples didn't stand a chance.

This in no way excuses the actions of the European powers. But to see the whole picture, we must realize that biology may have doomed the native populations at the first moment a European set foot on their soil.


Nov 30, 2013

Why is factoring numbers into primes a difficult problem?

Prime numbers are at the heart of the most difficult problems (and solutions) in number theory. For one example, Fermat's Last Theorem. For another, mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has claimed to have made the deepest discoveries to date; laid across four papers it will take the mathematical community years to verify his work.

Proof Claimed for Deep Connection between Prime Numbers

Why are prime numbers so hard ? Have a look at this graph :


This is of prime numbers, arranged in a spiral at the center. One thing you might notice is there appears to be quite a few diagonal lines - almost some kind of order. But another thing you notice is it looks a lot like noise - sure there's a few lines but mostly this looks like static on a an old-style television.

Prime numbers keep doing that to us. Patterns suggest themselves but then the primes always break the pattern.

There's no simple rule that cuts through the noise to tell us "Where are the hell are the primes?"

Is every even number (>2) the sum of two primes? Nobody knows. (EDIT - correction thanks to Douglas Zare) : Is there always always a prime between n^2 and (n+1)^2? Nobody knows. A great many questions like this remain unanswered.

To directly address your question - why is it so hard to factor a (large) number into its primes - it's because essentially we don't know where the primes are. We have to work backwards by trial and error. "Does it divide by 5? By 7? By 9 - whoops, that's composite - by 11?"

There have been some huge improvements in the efficiency of the hunt (see AKS primality test) so we don't have to plod along so slowly.

But still, we're plodding - still searching - because we don't know where the primes are.


Nov 30, 2013

What are some stories of overpriced software development?

The New York Times spent $40 Million to build a pay-wall for it's site.

So it could take payments like, say, your local florist.

When the pay-wall was complete, a few lines of CSS steered right around it.


Nov 30, 2013

To what extent can the media be blamed for America losing the Vietnam War?

We lost the war because :

We shouldn't have fought it in the first place. It was a civil war of no threat to the US; the division of North and South Vietnam was imposed by Western powers and ultimately intolerable to the Vietnamese.

Like the British in colonial America, we weren't fighting just an army. We were fighting an entire population using guerilla tactics, unwilling to surrender at any costs. Ho Chi Min warned his people in advance that Hanoi might be blown off the map, but they would never give up.

The media helped bring this disastrous misadventure to a more rapid close. 3 particular instances come to mind :


This image stung the conscience of a nation. A little girl hit by a napalm attack, clothes burned off, skin burned. This photo won a Pulitzer prize and was all over the print media. Once you see it, you never forget it. (The girl, Kim Phuc, recovered and now lives in Canada.)

Sure - war inevitably harms the innocent. But it better be for a good reason. We need to know the truth of why we're doing it and what is going on.

In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a leaked document created by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to 'prevent future policy errors.' The papers disclosed, among many other things :

The Johnson administration was repeatedly lying about American and Vietnamese casualties.

That South Vietnam was a puppet regime created by the United States.

That the real purpose of the war was to contain Communist China - who it turned out had no expansionist ambitions and was in fact despised by the Vietnamese (who went to war with China after defeating the united states.)


Walter Cronkite was often called the "most trusted man in America." In 1968, he shocked the Johnson administration and helped turn public opinion against the war.

" For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate ...


Walter Cronkite

The press did much not to "lose" this war, but to end a war which should never have been fought.


Dec 4, 2013

What one feature do you think should have existed in any Linux distro, but it doesn't?

Eric E. Hoover made a nice package that runs Netflix on Ubuntu using wine.

It only takes one gig and requires no fiddling; it Just Works

http//www.compholio.com/Netflix-desktop


Dec 4, 2013

What is the first little bit of math that made you realize that math is beautiful?

This simple proof of Pythagorean's theorem :


Take your right triangle ABC and arrange four of them as the picture shows.

The outer rectangle area is (a+b)^2.
Which is also equal to the inner rectangle - c^2 plus four times the area of the four right triangles : c^2 + 4ab/2.

Set these quantities equal, the 2ab terms cancel out and voila : a^2+b^2=c^2

I like how this proof involves introducing additional structure to illuminate the problem.


Dec 4, 2013

What's the best editor/IDE for PHP?

Phpstorm JetBrains PhpStorm and sublime The text editor you'll fall in love with (with PHP plugin) seem the most capable these days ...


Dec 5, 2013

What's the most idiotic thing you've ever said?

In my first job out of college, my boss was a woman named Jane.

The day before Thanksgiving, she said, "Oh geez. I just got word my great uncle just passed away. Now I have to call everyone and let them know he won't be there for Thanksgiving."

I blurted out, "Now that's an understatement !!!"


Dec 6, 2013

Can energy be turned into matter?

Sure, we do it all the time in particle accelerators.

If you push on an object to get it close to the speed of light, it gets more massive.

This is how the 'speed limit' of c works; the harder you push on an object approaching c, the more mass it acquires to frustrate your efforts. The energy you apply gets converted directly to mass.

This happens to an undetectably minuscule degree whenever you throw a ball (that is, accelerate any object from a non inertial frame of reference.)


Dec 7, 2013

What are some of the weird uses of a screwdriver?

Controlling a nuclear reaction. Badly.

In 1946 a researcher named Louis Slotin was working with the core of an atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

He had a critical mass of plutonium, surrounded by two hemispheres of beryllium (a nuclear reflector). One half was stacked on top of the other, and he was using a screw-driver to create a tiny space between them. If the two halves were to touch, the core would go super-critical in an uncontrolled chain-reaction.

Recreation of Slotin's experiment

Slotin was twisting the screw-driver to tease the two halves ever closer. He then measured the radiation levels. This was known as "tickling the dragon's tail" (Demon core).

If you're thinking this looks incredibly dangerous - the survivors would agree.

At 3:20 PM, May 21, 1946, the screw-driver slipped. The top half clunked onto the bottom half.

Everyone in the room felt a blast of heat and the air around the core shone bright blue.

Slotin grabbed the top half of the assembly with his bare hand and knocked it to the floor.

Within 3 minutes he was vomiting from radiation sickness. He died nine days later.

(Thanks User-9694697710185063839 to for this video of a dramatic re-enactment from the movie Fat Man and Little Boy).


Dec 7, 2013

Is vaping safe for minors?

NO!

It's got nicotine! Nicotine is addictive!


Dec 8, 2013

Why is it politically incorrect to refer to black people as black in the USA?

A perspective from a Northern white guy :

I use the word 'black' but tread lightly. I do this : I say "African American" at least once to acknowledge the proper term, but then use 'black' for brevity.

I'm reminded of an incident from second grade. Someone came into the classroom and asked "Who is Jim [some last name]? I answered that he was not in this class, that he was black, tall, with light brown eyes."

The staff member snarled at me, "You don't use the word BLACK to describe someone."

I answered with all the innocence of a seven year old : "I didn't know there was anything wrong with being black ..."


Dec 8, 2013

Matt Stone, one of the show's creators, described The Book of Mormon as "an atheist's love letter to religion." Does this make sense, or is he just joking?

I think both Parker and Stone are, in a sense, always joking but in a serious way.

Stone has a deep personal interest in Zen-Buddhism and I think it manifests in The Book of Mormon and lots of South Park episodes in a very particular way :

He flaunts dichotomies. Even tries to breaks them.

Some examples,

In an interview with Charlie Rose about politics, Parker says, "The people on the left, and the right, are really the SAME people." Neither is correct or to be trusted.

In a South Park episode, a character says, "maybe just believing in God brings him into existence."

In another episode, Richard Dawkins is their target. Cartman travels into the future where all religion is gone due to Dawkins, but the atheists have divided into warring camps over the triviality of what to call themselves. The point being that atheists are equally fanatical and irrational.

In an episode which lampoons Mormonism, the Mormon kid closes with, "I never asked you to believe as I do. Maybe some of the things in the book are crazy. But I have a great life because of my faith. You couldn't see past that and just be my friend. You got a lot of growing up to do. Suck my balls, Kyle."

I think Stone's description as an "atheist's love letter to religion" is a serious joke; a deliberate paradox intended to break the dichotomy of atheist and believer.


Dec 9, 2013

Sanjay Sabnani: Is (removed) the Homer Simpson we deserve?

Nah, Homer is funny because he's dumb.

Sanjay is funny because he's smart.


Dec 9, 2013

Would an INFP and an ENFP make a good couple?

The Meyers-Briggs test may be complete snake-oil.

It has certainly never been validated in any scientific sense. It has been repeatedly criticized by many sources from the US Army, innumerable psychologists, and even CNN :

Have we all been duped by the Myers-Briggs test? - Fortune Management

The Meyers Briggs Type Indicator is a trademark owned by a business called Consulting Psychologists Press.

This is a psychometric test with a customer service number. Call them and ask at 800.624.1765. Operators are standing by.

Operators indeed. If you dig, you will uncover endless studies where the Meyer's Briggs results is not much better than noise and offers no meaningful insight into personality. You'll just have to get past the many, many publications put out by Consulting Psychologists Press.


Dec 10, 2013

Discrete Mathematics: How do you prove that the sum of the squares of two odd integers cannot be a perfect square?

To expand on Alexandre Thiery's answer, observe that the sum of two odds is an even number. The square of an odd number is always odd.

Go from there ....


Dec 10, 2013

What are some examples of being blinded by privilege?

The oft-repeated myth of the self-made man. "I was born to poor parents and now I'm uber-wealthy and I did it all myself!"

No, you didn't. Say you were born lower-middle class in America. You're in a country which has grown fat on the work of slaves and the imperialist exploitation of weaker nations. You went to school funded by blue-collar families in your town who had to budget carefully to get a monthly trip to a restaurant. On roads they also paved.

Your parents sacrificed for every meal, pair of pants, and Christmas gift. They may have paid for your higher education.

In a country where you can say whatever you want and even open your own business. Because a bunch of young men with bright futures ended up face-down in the mud of a battle-field to secure these freedoms.

You didn't get polio because generations before worked tirelessly to find a vaccine. You didn't die of appendicitis because surgeons kept cutting open the doomed in a desperate effort to save them, until they finally learned how to.

Nobody can just throw you out of your mansion at the point of a gun because thousands of cops have taken a bullet to ensure that we are secure in our persons and our possessions.

Your brain - which is so productive it made you lots of money - inherited an intellectual legacy beginning with Ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India... You know a thousand things it took millenia to figure out.

And even now, should - God forbid - you feel a pain in your chest, you can dial 3 digits on your phone and your fellow humans will rush to your house with life-saving equipment. They won't ask if you have any money.

You're not self-made, nobody is. You may have been born poor, but you got one hell of an inheritance.


Dec 10, 2013

What is this object I keep seeing in undeveloped areas around Northern Alberta?

This is the image, originally posted in the question details :

We have an answer thanks to Alan Nardelli, friend of mine and occasional Quora visitor. He figured it out and facebooked me.

That is a corner reflector designed to reflect radar signals from a satellite. The pyramid is made to be both radar transparent and to prevent snow from accumulating.

They detect minute deformations in the ground using a technology called RADAR-SAT2. A small change in the surface of the ground is detected by a satellite which bounces a radar signal off the triangle. The algorithm which computes the surface changes from the radar signal is called INSAR.

Here's a series of them deployed along a steam pipeline :

And here's a close-up which removes any doubt :

Such measurements are used to

Ensure well casing and facility integrity

Evaluate enhanced oil recovery effectiveness

Assess and mitigate environmental impacts

All the above information was taken from Page on Searchanddiscovery

Hats off to Alan Nardelli for solving this mystery for us.


Dec 14, 2013

What do people think of the recent "affluenza" defense that allowed a North Texas teenager to get off with only probation after killing four people in a drunk driving accident?

You are being played. The media has whipped up a story to catch your eye so they can sell ads.

The lawyers and expert witnesses for the defense are brought in to try everything legal to get the kid off. 'Affluenza' was a long-shot and everybody knew it.

The judge went easy on this minor - perhaps wrongly - because he is a minor, traumatized, unlikely to re-offend and God only knows why.

Too lenient a sentence? Seems to me , yea. But I doubt the neologism 'Affluenza' got any serious consideration from the Judge.

Instead it's a great headline and effective way to provoke the ire of millions of middle class consumers.

We'll be back to discuss the Affluenza issue some more - after a brief message from our sponsors ...


Dec 16, 2013

What makes Neil deGrasse Tyson a fascinating character?

He is this generation's Carl Sagan.

Like Sagan, he is folksy. Approachable. The kind of guy you'd expect to find next to you at a townie bar. But then he suprises you. Like Sagan, he conveys not just the facts of science, but also the wonder, even the reverence for the mystery of the Cosmos that unfolds before us.

It's good to go back and watch this video from Sagan. It's worth your five minutes, I promise. It's one of the most memorable and beautiful pieces of video made in the seventies, IMO.

Degrasse does a good job as a successor to Sagan, upholding a legacy of awe.


Dec 16, 2013

Could the KAL007 tragedy have sparked a nuclear war?

I don't think so.

The jetliner was not mistaken for an incoming bomber or missile. Rather the Soviet's suspected that the airliner was an RC-135 spy-plane, which looks a lot like a passenger jet, especially on radar and especially at night.


Compared the a 747 passenger jet :


For some reason, the jetliner was hundreds of miles into Soviet airspace, over sensitive defense targets. There was also considerable confusion within the Soviet Defense system itself, it essentially malfunctioned at certain key points.

See the write-up here in Airforce Magazine : The Death of Korean Air Lines Flight 007


Dec 16, 2013

Does Quora's answer ranking algorithm downgrade answers that contain profanity?

We're not likely to get an answer from inside Quora - they want their ranking algorithm secret so people don't game it.

To guess from outside Quora - No, that would be a very strange heuristic to add.
In fact, any rule based on the content itself (like length, etc) would likely do dumb things. I would venture so far to say that the ranking of an answer on a page is entirely independent of the answer's content; instead it is wholly dependent on the answerer's PeopleRank and other user's interaction with the answer (upvotes, downvotes, comments, etc.)


Dec 17, 2013

Is human rights universal and does it transcend all cultures? Why?

I believe so; when the American Colonists declared their independence from England, they claimed human rights to be a first principal, not derived from anything else. I'm inclined to agree.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government -- Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Dec 20, 2013

Did NASA receive an SOS call from another galaxy?

No.

Humans have never received any signal from space that's decoded into any sort of message - not for lack of trying. These are the receivers of SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.)


They never picked up anything.

Secondly, a distress call would be nearly impossible to express to an alien intelligence. They don't speak our language - their language may be visual, tactile, electric pulses - or non existent.

About the only thing we could interpret is "We are here and we are intelligent." For example, one beep, then two, then three, etc.

Lastly, the source is the Weekly World News. This is not a publication exactly famous for it's, um, editorial restraint. Some samples :




OK, that last one I can believe, but you get the idea.


Dec 21, 2013

Why didn't Serge Grishenkoff make the cut for Top Writers 2013?

He made up the list. His absence from it is a flimsy attempt to disguise this fact.


Dec 22, 2013

How does one explain homosexuality when it does not lead to procreation? Does homosexuality break the chain of life i.e. reproduction?

It doesn't. Nature doesn't just work one person at a time.

New evidence suggests the female relatives of gay men are more fertile.

Camperio-Ciani's team questioned 98 gay and 100 straight men about their closest relatives - 4600 people in total. They found that female relatives of gay men had more children on average than the female relatives of straight men. But the effect was only seen on their mother's side of the family.
Mothers of gay men produced an average of 2.7 babies compared with 2.3 born to mothers of straight men. And maternal aunts of gay men had 2.0 babies compared with 1.5 born to the maternal aunts of straight men.
-- Survival of genetic homosexual traits explained (2004)


So if there is a "gay gene" (for men. anyway), there appears to be evolutionary pressure for the gene to persist in the population.

The "gay gene" was a phantom in 2004 when that was written, but in 2008 Camperio-Ciani's team identified two genes which, when modeled in a computer simulation, produced fertile women and gay men.

Why Gays Don’t Go Extinct

The theory needs further verification and to be expanded to consider lesbians.

But early indications point to the conclusion that, in terms of nature and evolution, that gay men are ... on the right track, baby, and were born that way.


Dec 22, 2013

Who are the 2013 Top Writers on Quora?


A two-fer! Top Writer Jill Uchiyama with her significant other also-top writer Christopher Reiss form a rare combination seen in the wild : A top-writer breeding pair.


Dec 22, 2013

I am drinking and driving a lot. What are some things I can do to stop myself? I have never been caught.

You wake with a pounding headache. The lights are bright.

You try to put your hand over your eyes, but suddenly realize you are handcuffed to a hospital bed.

The chart at the foot of the bed says "Alcohol Intoxication." You'll be fine. But you're not going home.

You don't remember, but you killed two children in the car you hit last night. You'll be seeing their parents in court.

The Judge will send you to jail. 15 years later, long after your existential angst has passed, your job applications have the box checked : convicted felon.

One of the parents of your victims committed suicide.

A cop walks toward your hospital bed.

"You have the right to remain silent ...."

You close your eyes and wish to God you could do yesterday over, and put down the keys or the booze.

By an inexplicable miracle there is a brief flash of light, and you're back to your normal life - a day earlier. The only trace of that horrible morning is a post written by some stranger on the Internet.

Your move.


Dec 23, 2013

How do I display a message on a website that draws attention to it in a gentle way?

Insert the message *into* the page, not over it, at the very top with a big X button to dismiss it.

Like Facebook does.


Dec 23, 2013

What events in history would be most tweeted about if Twitter existed during those events? What would that tweet look like?

"Germany invaded Poland." #lyingbastards #itson #screwitweresplittingtheatom


Dec 23, 2013

My son is reading The God Delusion. Should I be worried?

As a teen, I read Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, and Atlas Shrugged.

I did not turn into a raving lunatic.

Just a rounded lunatic.


Dec 23, 2013

How do I stop feeling bad that I was not selected as a Top Writer 2013?

Imagine the selection process.

Quora has what - 50 employees?

Suppose 10 have to come up with the list. They have hundreds of people to wade through. They've got to knock some people off from last year. Try to find new additions.

They've got all kinds of metrics in front of them : most answers, most followers, most credits.

Some of the list-makers have some favorite authors that the metrics missed. They argue amongst themselves.

How big should the list be, anyway? How many do we keep from last year?

Who are the hidden gems nobody knows about? Who are the shoo-ins, that keep pumping out popular stuff? Who are the edge cases?

This process must be a god-awful mess (and a painful exercise for the Quora team, who really just wants to get home for Christmas.)

it's really easy for a great writer to get missed. Really, really easy.

Selection processes always yield false negatives. These movies didn't win an Oscar :

Citizen Kane (often cited as the greatest American movie ever made)

Taxi Driver

Apocalypse Now


These actors never won an oscar :

Joaquin Pheonix

Sigourney Weaver

Leo DiCaprio


No Nobel prize was ever awarded for this guy's Theory of Special - or General - Relativity.


Special recognition is great, don't get me wrong. But false negatives are inevitable, and you're in good company.


Dec 23, 2013

What do you think of the statement "The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take."?

This is the programmer's version of the old carpenter's credo :

"Measure twice, cut once."


Dec 24, 2013

How do I debug stack trace dumps in C++?

Gdb.


Dec 25, 2013

If it meant saving the thousands of lives that are claimed by guns every year would American gun owners be willing to give up their arms?

This is the "teleological" argument in the philosophy of law, where the ends justify the means.

Put simply, "Pass law X, and good thing Y results."

It doesn't hold up. If it did, we could save more lives by banning motorcycles, alcohol and cigarettes.

Laws do not exist to Save Lives. Laws exist to protect our freedoms, and the principals from which they derive.

I am personally anti-gun, but recognize that the "save lives" argument of itself is insufficient.


Dec 27, 2013

What are your top 3 productivity hacks made the the most impact in year 2013?

On your phone, take a screenshot to remember movie times, flight times, etc.

For example, you look up train departure times on your web browser. On an iPhone, press home+off to snap a pic of your screen. Easy reference for later, even if u lose your signal.

Just came up with this today out of necessity, barely making it under the wire for 2013 ...


Dec 27, 2013

What's likely to happen to Edward Snowden? Will he ever be able to return to his home in the U.S.?

A fascinating possibility is that Snowden will be pardoned by Obama on his last day in office.


Dec 27, 2013

What contributions have Britons made to the development of computer science?

Computer technology really has its roots in Great Britain. The first numerical computing machine was designed (but not completed) by Brit Charles Babbage. His work contains the critical components of the modern computing device.

Entirely mechanical and very complex, it never did see the light of day.

Then comes the electronic age, and another Brit named Alan Turing. Turing was tasked with breaking the German's message coding. The German's encrypted their messages using a (mostly) mechanical cypher called Enigma. Think of it as a very complex typewriter with whirling gears and simple electrical connections.

Turing built *electronic* version of the cypher using vacuum tubes (the project was called Ultra). This enabled Turing to automate the task of deciphering the message by brute force, many thousands of times faster than would be possible with the mechanical Enigma.

American mathematician Von Neumann enhances Babbage's designs. Various universities began building general purpose computers using tubes and relays as "gates". By modern standards : slow, huge, and flakey - but they calculated thousands of times faster than a human could.

The computer was born.


Dec 30, 2013

How does the linear speed of the earth's rotation compare to commercial air crafts' linear speed?

At the poles, zero.

At the equator, the earth's circumference is 21,000 miles, divided by 24 hours is 7/8 *1000, about 785 miles per hour. A bit faster than the speed of sound.

So a super-sonic jet can fly "backwards in time" even at the equator.

A commercial jet moves about 350 miles per hour, so at European latitudes you're significant competition for the earth's rotation (about half)


Jan 3, 2014

Why can't people accept that we are not alive and are only biological machines?

I've never seen a machine deny its own consciousness.

Descarte's cogito ergo sum applies.

You are screaming that you don't exist.


Jan 4, 2014

Meditation: How can one use mindfulness to enhance problem-solving and learn difficult subjects?

I don't know where you got the phrase "use mindfulness", but if it was from a book - burn it. If it was from a person, go find them and hit them in the face.

Trust me - you're mind is on.

To learn difficult subjects and enhance problem solving you need to focus, to practice, to take breaks. Follow your talents and realize you just won't be good at some things. But you won't know until you try really hard first.

For some people, a good mentor or teacher help. Others learn by themselves.

Discover your own best way to learn and develop.

Your mind will get full over time.


Jan 5, 2014

What is the relation between high or low frequencies and the sharpness of an image?

Light on the blue end (high frequency) end of the spectrum is harder to focus with a lense. It tends to scatter.

Light on the red end (low frequency) focusses more sharply.

This is why airplane pilots wear amber colored sunglasses - they block out blue light which doesn't focus well.

I don't know the physics behind it ...


Jan 6, 2014

What trivial knowledge might save your life one day?

Pedestrians are much more visible at night if they hold their smart phone, screen facing traffic.

Especially when crossing streets or forced off the sidewalk. Make sure your screen is something bright (Quora has lots of white!). Turn off your auto-lock and perhaps turn up your screen brightness.

Most pedestrians are hit simply because the driver didn't notice them.


Jan 8, 2014

What is the temperature where you are right now?

11 Fahrenheit, -11 Celsius in Salem, Massachusetts, US.


Jan 8, 2014

Whom should Quora hire as Writer Relations Lead?

Nobody.

I don't think relations to the contributors should be siloed to any one person or position. This will have the effect of isolating the rest of the Quora team from the community.


Jan 8, 2014

Why has human evolution made toothache so debilitating?

To add to Dan Holliday's answer,

Only recently did humanity live long enough to get a toothache. Through most of our evolution we had lifespans of 30 or so, when toothache is fairly rare. We usually died of appendicitis, cholera, an untreated wound, etc. first.

Our diets contained much less sugar, so tooth decay was probably less common.

If you are genetically prone to toothe decay, the species is better off without you (sorry bout that). So best to leave you in debilitating pain before you make weak-toothed babies.

Insist on living? Fine. As the abscess pushes the tooth up, it gets easier to rip out. Which as Dan says, you really want to do because else you can die.

Prior to your primitive extraction, the pain keeps you from chewing on that side. Good. Pressure on the abscess can spread the infection (your nerves evolved so that pressure-sensitivity is often the first sign of abscess.)


Jan 12, 2014

Given 'N' points (xi, yi) in clockwise order on a circle, centered at the origin, how can we design a linear time algorithm that determines whether there are two points that are antipodal, i.e., the line connecting the two points goes through the origin?

What happens when you add two antipodal points together?


Jan 14, 2014

In terms of overall performance, What is the best mobile phone in the market right now?

All I can say is this :

People know I work in mobile software. So when their phone goes wonky, they tend to come to me for help.

It's always an android device that's misbehaving. Always.

Always.

I have an iPhone.


Jan 15, 2014

Should I continue my IT path?

If you don't like it, don't do it.

A big part of college is finding out what you like and are good at. And a big part of that is finding what you don't like and aren't good at.

Find something you can't stop doing. Something that keeps you up past your bedtime.

Try to build a career around that.

It is better to be a happy and excellent baker than a miserable and mediocre programmer.


Jan 15, 2014

Why do people think homosexuality is normal? Considering that it conflicts significantly with evolution, a core biological theory, how could it be concluded that it is a normal variant of sexuality?

It's not normal - defined by Websters as "usual or ordinary."

Neither is red hair, high intelligence, owning a beagle, getting into Harvard or living in Wyoming.


Jan 16, 2014

Logical Reasoning: Have you ever made any Sherlock-like deductions in your life?

In college, we went to go visit a friend. But we pulled on front of his house, and didn't see his car. "He's not here, his car is gone."

I scanned left and right. Not an empty spot in view. "He may still be home. He's got nowhere close to park."


Jan 16, 2014

Is my LinkedIn profile with my picture in a suit and tie hindering my chances in finding jobs in startups?

Chiming in from the East Coast, it will also hurt your chances at tech startups in the Boston area.


Jan 17, 2014

What is the loneliest thing in the world?

The loneliest thing in the world is also the most ironic. Being just another obstacle on the busy streets of a city.


Jan 17, 2014

What caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?

A catastrophic management failure.

It was too cold that morning.

That morning, January 28, 1986 was the coldest ever shuttle launch : 31 degrees F. Pretty unusual for central Florida.

The O-ring seals for the Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) had not been tested at temperatures below 53 degrees F, and could become brittle, crack and break.

The day before the launch, the O-ring manufacturer, Thiokol, had a conference call with NASA. Thiokol engineers recommended delaying the launch till warmer weather.

NASA replied, memorably, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch — next April?" (This accident would ground the shuttle program for two years.)

Thiokol managers reversed the recommendation over the objection of its engineers. They reasoned there were secondary O-rings in case the primary O-rings failed. NASA managers green-lighted the launch.

The O-rings starting failing immediately as The Challenger was lifting off, causing this plume of grey smoke :

At 58 seconds, flaming gas is seen escaping the right SRB :

At 73 seconds, the liquid hydrogen tank was breached and the shuttle exploded.


Jan 21, 2014

What is something that you can do better than anybody you know?

I have trouble recognizing faces, but I can recognize a voice I've heard, just once, years after.


Jan 21, 2014

How do I overcome my chronic anxiety disorder?

Good answers here. There are some more given in this related question :

What are life strategies to reduce general anxiety?

The good news is that anxiety is highly treatable. A psychiatrist can help through medication, therapy, or both. But first s/he needs to see you, assess what's going on, figure you out a bit.

Like a toothache, each day you delay treatment is just pointless suffering.


Jan 23, 2014

What should be the salutation if I had to call someone at 9:30 p.m.? Good night or good evening?

"Good evening" opens a conversation, like "Hello."

"Good night" ends a conversation, like "Good Bye". It is also used to end a day, as some one retires for sleep.


Jan 29, 2014

Does vaping (using electronic cigarette) makes your throat feels dry as if you are having a sore throat? Or did I inhale it too much?

The main ingredients of ecig vapor - vegetable glycerin (Glycerol) or Propylene Glycol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol - are highly hydrophilic. They attract and bond to water molecules. They are used industrially for precisely this purpose, keeping humidity down.

Put more simply : vaping gives you cotton mouth. Drink lots of water - also tea with honey, or honey lozenges, will coat and protect your throat.


Jan 30, 2014

What is the best rational explanation to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

We know it's really Earth the Star Child (formerly Bowman) is orbiting : the book mentions radar operators on earth flipping out.

It appears that Bowman has reached a new and final(?) stage of evolution; composed of pure energy.


Jan 30, 2014

Why is Thomas Edison more famous than Nikola Tesla?

This is changing.

A few points :

In post-war America, this mythos arose about the wiley, practical, American inventor. It's origin goes all the way back to Eli Whitney's cotton gin, and forward to Bell's telephone, Edison's light bulb, and even as far as Wozniak soldering the first Apple in his garage.

It's a very American thing. Very egalitarian and individualistic. That no matter how obscure somebody is, no matter what their education - the impoverished tinkerer can create a whole new industry.

And it has happened a good many times.

Edison understood his culture well and promoted himself as the inventing "Wizard of Menlo Park." One of the popular words at the time was "whiz" - which derives from both "fast" and "wizard".

In radio sound-bites - Edison positioned himself as the "Wizard" who invented the electric light bulb (he didn't - he improved and mass produced it.) He also created the first R&D lab which sought to bring products to market.

He deserves credit as a technically gifted industrialist and showman, whose public persona was carefully crafted for effect.

But he was a high school dropout who understood very little about the nuances of electricity, sound, or light.

Publicity fades.

It is Tesla who is the father of the electric age. His break-through insight of alternating current lit up the world, helped give birth to radio and a hundred other things.

There is a 30 minute exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science devoted almost exclusively to Tesla as such.

History is being rewritten.

Another problem is Tesla's legacy is hounded by an online posse of crackpots. Tesla was not murdered or sabotaged by JP Morgan or anyone else. Tesla did not discover free energy. Tesla didn't want to give power away, only to transmit it without wires. Tesla was not from outer space, could not teleport himself, or move things with his mind.

Tesla was also a very strange person and wild experimenter. He tried to set the earth itself into electric 'resonance' and lived in a hotel room with pigeons. Wanted to build a "death ray" for the military. His thick Serbian accent made people suspicious.

But none of that matters in the long term. Edison's PR compaign fades from memory and one thing remains - Tesla was the first person to understand how to generate and transmit power over distance. From the steam age to the electric age in a flash of brilliance.

This has been addressed in a no less authoritative source than .... Epic! Rap Battles! Of Histwaaaaaaaaaaaaah!


Jan 31, 2014

What are an experience worth to take to groom own entrepreneurial quality?

Take all your cash and credit cards and throw them in a bush.

Try to talk a complete stranger into driving you to Minnesota.


Feb 4, 2014

I'm about to graduate with my PhD in computer science, but I’m afraid of coding. I do mostly theoretical work. I hate coding. I’m thinking of teaching at a community college, but I also think this is a bad reason to be a teacher. What should I do?

I think you owe it to yourself and others to neither code nor teach coding if you don't like it.

PhD is some major cred. Perhaps you can pivot into something you like : for example, data visualization in biochemistry? Animation? Robotics?


Feb 5, 2014

What are the hardest things in social shopping?

People don't like their personal connections being used as an advertising channel.

They are very attuned to when it happens and generally don't tolerate it (witness Facebook's Beacon debacle.)

Social Media is The Big Thing now and advertisers would love to ride that wave. But unlike the media of radio and television, this is not a passive audience.

These are people who both broadcast and receive, who filter their feed - who are in control. Media is being decentralized from a few corporations and a few hundred advertisers into a billion little pieces.

The sun is setting on Madison Avenue as technology has connected people and unplugged corporations.


Feb 6, 2014

What do people think about CVS's decision to end sales of tobacco products by October 2014?

As a 35-year smoker who has just gone a month without tobacco (yay!) I'll chime in.

CVS had already gotten rid of all tobacco products in Boston and a few other areas. From a smoker's point of view I cared very little.

The key point is that smokers buy their cigarettes daily. I did. The addicted smoker is usually leaving open the possibility that they just might quit tomorrow, or cut down today. There is no volume discount to buying in bulk as taxes keep the price fixed.

(People in northern MA - when they do stock up - will jump the border into New Hampshire to dodge the taxes.)

People don't normally visit CVS daily; they go when they need a health care product. So going to CVS was never part of a typical smoker's routine.

No, they get their fix at convenience stores along their daily route. The cost is the same (again due to taxes.)

Anyone who has waited in line at a convenience store can see the smokers stocking up on ... just one pack.

Did I mention I haven't smoked in a month?


Feb 6, 2014

Is CVS's decision to end sales of tobacco products a great act of corporate citizenship? Or should we be suspicious about it?

Yes - nothing to be suspicious about. CVS is positioning itself as a health-care company, selling an addictive poison is incongruous with that image.


Feb 6, 2014

What is a callback function in JS or Android/Windows Phone 8 programming?

A callback function gets called later, at an unknown time.

It's old terminology which harkens back to the first GUI's.

So your program fires and all sorts of things are created and initialized. On the screen is a Save button.

You would assign a callback function to the Save button, to be executed when it's pressed.

Callbacks may be invoked by user-events like a click, timers, or lots of other mechanisms.

Another example is you may do something which takes some time, like an Ajax call to a web server.

You don't want to wait around being unresponsive while the call completes, so you fire it asynchronously with a callback.

Meaning, your JS continues immediately after submitting the request. Later, when your Ajax call has the data you want, your callback is invoked.

Callbacks are a way to handle events which occur at unknown times.


Feb 6, 2014

Should discussion of conspiracy theories be banned on Quora? As a community, are we valuing niceness over debating the truth?

To address your Question Details : every indication is that Ron Maimon was banned due to uncivil behavior towards other users (and probably admins in private.)

His theories that - for instance - the Boston bombing was a government setup played no part in this administrative decision.

It came down to behavior, not content.


Feb 12, 2014

Plan to build a social network where users can review a product or service using one of the SOCIAL moods i.e Silly, Omg, Cool, Inspires, Awesome, Lovely.

I like the idea very much; I think you should throw out your terminology.

The ability to offer a variety of feelings beyond 'up' or 'down' is a great one, and is nowhere present that I know of.

However, the newly minted phrase 'Social moods' is confusing. I almost stopped reading your question when I hit it.

I suggest the term "Reaction" to introduce and discuss your idea. "Reaction : so much more than Like".


Feb 14, 2014

From an evolutionary standpoint, why are human beings not equipped to naturally deal with cold weather? Animals that live in cold areas do not require additional clothing. Why aren't human beings equipped in the same way?

We are.

We evolved big brains that enabled us figure out that we could take the skins of other animals, put them on ourselves and keep warm. Also to control fire.


Feb 23, 2014

How can positive energy be shared in a work place?

Never be impatient with somebody who asks an obvious (to you) technical question. Welcome questions, don't bullshit when you dont't know. I use the phrase "nobody is born knowing this stuff."

Realize people are multitalented. Engineering can help Marketing, some sales people want to learn to code, and so on. Tear down those silos and let people start pitching in where they feel useful.

Are you charting progress through daily standup meetings? KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF. The "scrum" has mutated into a daily status meeting. Status doesn't need to be measured that frequently.

Watch out for managers. Their performance is very difficult to monitor - the people below them can be good and they can be awful. Every one should have an answer to what they DID the last six months. Not what the staff they supervise did, but their personal contribution. Flew to 10 cities, began a Scala prototype, whatever. The ugly truth is most managers can go away entirely and productivity often rises.

Before every meeting starts, ask each person if there is more pressing work elsewhere. Mandatory meetings are a rare necessity.

This last one is a bit sharp, but I claim 27 years experience. Some people are just ... Dumb. They can't write, can't code - they can't do anything. They hide by the thousands in the largest cooperations where there lack of ... anything ... Is concealed beneath jargon-laden, illiterate emails. Their decisions are basically random - they are dangerous and should be let go.


Feb 24, 2014

Are you a bad CS major if you don't spend your free time programming/doing side projects?

No - you're a great student.

But you may lack the heart of a developer.


Mar 1, 2014

What's the ‘tl;dr’ of different countries' entire histories?

USA : Europe jumped across the Atlantic and landed on the heads of those already living here.


Mar 3, 2014

The book 1984 was considered in the past a nightmare by everybody. Now that I fear it has become a reality with cameras watching us everywhere we go. Why does no one say a word?

1984 was a reverse prophesy.

While surveillance cams are common, it is the citizenry that carries cameras everywhere.

If the cops step out of line, it ends up on youtube or iReporter.

Ironically, the police state is kept in check by Little Brother.


Mar 5, 2014

What do you think are the causes of corruption in media (print and electronic) and what is the earliest known instance of such unethical behavior you remember?

Media is persuasion.

Persuasion is power.

And power corrupts.

The earliest instance I know was a major cause of The Revolutionary War (American War of Independence.)

I refer to the Boston Massacre. Which was nothing of the sort.


We see British Soldiers gunning down innocents, their commander behind them.
If you blow up the picture, you will notice the engraving was created by a certain well-known silversmith - Paul Revere. Yea, that Paul Revere.

The picture is a lie. In a trial held by the colonists, it was revealed :

The commander was standing in front of his soldiers, physically forbidding them to fire.

The crowd was a riot who were throwing wooden clubs and repeatedly yelling "Fire! Fire!" at the soldiers to dare and confuse them.

The first shot went off when one soldier was struck directly in the head by a rock or a club, fell to the ground and his musket went off. The other soldiers then fired in "contagious fire", having seen a shot go off, unclear as to what their orders were and under a dangerous barrage of clubs and stones.

The commander was acquitted along with six of the soldiers present. Again, by the colonists themselves. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter, but sentenced only to a branding upon the thumb (under an arcane medieval loophole.)


( source Boston Massacre Historical Society )

Clearly this was no massacre.

A word about Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was America's first newspaper mogul. And he didn't mind adjusting the truth when it suited him. Among his many publications was Poor Richard's Almanack.

Franklin had an almanac competitor by the name of Titan Leeds. Franklin did away with him by announcing that the guy had died, and printed an obituary. Leeds, of course, was alive but blind-sided. When he went around insisting he was indeed alive, Franklin warned of a hoard of Leed impersonators.

Each year thereafter, Franklin acknowledged the anniversary of Leeds passing.
When Leeds finally did kick the bucket, Franklin thanked the impersonators for ending their charade.

I do not mean to impune the legacy of Franklin; this is a man risen from modest means to global fame. He was pivotal in winning the American Revolution by persuading France to support the Colonies. But ethically, this was a guy for whom, well ... the ends justified the means.

Revere made that silver engraving entitled "The bloody massacre." It was a lithograph (Lithography) designed for reproduction on a printing press. It was calculated to enrage a population of formerly loyal british subjects.

It was rushed to market all over the colonies - especially to Franklin's publication The Pennsylvania Gazette. This was really the world's first newspaper chain, copies of which were distributed round the clock by horsemen to the far reaches of the colonies. (Benjamin also designed the postal service.) It was the colonial equivalent to the New York Times.

Within a week or so most of the American population had seen Revere's depiction of the fictitious "bloody massacre."

America would be at war with Great Britain within six years.

And to this day - most Americans don't know those British soldiers were acquitted by the colonists themselves (and defended by none other than future president John Adams.)


Mar 8, 2014

Why was the American Civil War won by the Union rather than the Confederacy?

Technology advanced beyond military tactics, resulting in a shocking war of attrition that neither side expected. The side with more men and ammunition was fated to win.

The major cause of the high casualty rate (30% in many large battles) came from a small invention : The Minie Ball.

This was a new kind of bullet invented by the French, and in the hands of both North and South. They were the key to bringing 'rifled' barrels to the battlefield.

'Rifling' refers to the turning threads inside the barrel. They set the bullet spinning. The spin stabilizes the flight so that gun is now deadly accurate.

A practiced soldier could kill a man a half mile away.

Rifled barrels had been in existence for some time, but were of little use on the battle-field. They were too high maintenance : the bullet had to be a very tight fit within the barrel making it more difficult to load. More importantly the threads would collect soot. This would jam the gun.

The Minie ball was easy to slip down the barrel - it was not a tight fit. The 'wings' at the bottom would spread out from the sudden pressure of firing. They would grab onto the threads, gaining spin and cleaning soot as they went.

So it could be fired as rapidly as 'smooth bore' muskets. But these would actually hit the man in its sites.

Tactics hadn't adjusted for this, and still had rows of men facing each other on open fields.

The battle of Antietam : 3,650 dead, 17,000 wounded out of 120,000 soldiers.

The result was a soldier had little chance of avoiding bullets for 5 or 6 battles. It was a matter of who ran out of bodies and munitions first.


Mar 10, 2014

What are your views about the statement: "Earth is the only planet where intelligent creatures like human beings exist"?

I am continually baffled by the number of scientific people who take the shockingly unscientific approach of assuming the existence of an entity never detected.

Many cite the number of stars in the cosmos and assume life must exist on some other planet, simply guessing at one of the coefficients in Drake's equation (e.g., life must come about on 1% of planets with suitable climate.)

We see no life. We detect no radio signals from alien intelligence.

Unable to calculate the probability that life emerges in suitable climates and absent and any evidence thus far, science *demands* we say :

It is possible but as yet never observed.

It is a hypothesis with no evidence to support it.

As yet we are unable to compute Drake's equation so there is no theoretical basis to think it likely.

There is no theoretical or experimental basis to challenge the null hypothesis that we are alone.

To claim there must be alien life is to exhibit blind faith, which science so vehemently decries everywhere else.


Mar 10, 2014

Do actors smoke real cigarettes on TV shows and movies?

Apparently, yes.

But if you watch carefully, most actors do not inhale - they either fill their mouth with smoke and blow it out or there is a quick cut after the puff.


Mar 10, 2014

What are some of the rarely mentioned trivia about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

The Afghani resistance used Soviet Weapons - that appeared to have been captured.

In actuality the US begged them off *Israel*.


Mar 12, 2014

What's the biggest thing you've ever changed your opinion about?

Everything.

I used to be a socialist.

Then, briefly, I got into Rand. Probably would have called myself an objectivist for a while. (I did some drugs in my 20's).

Now I'm some kind of half-assed libertarian (in some cases the collective good trumps the individual.)

As a child/late teen I thought Christians were dumb, or at clinging to pre-scientific mythology. My father - an atheist philosophy teacher - corrected that notion with CS Lewis and others. "They may be wrong - but dumb they ain't. So may I, by the way."

I was a materialist once : Science explained everything. But as I studied Godel, Heisenberg, the Big Bang, I see science as inherently limited and entwined with mystery.

While Evolution certainly occurred and gave rise to species - I eventually came to believe it does not (yet) settle the emergence of sentience in Man. The modern brain appears rather abruptly and the fossil record about its emergence hasn't yet got enough data points.

Man-made global warming : I flipped on this a few years ago. Scientifically, the whole thing hinges on 'tipping points' in mathematical models which are so crude that only recently was cloud cover taken into account.

There is massive selection bias in the scientific journals - studies which challenge anthropogenic climate change don't get funded. So polling the scientific literature is not reliable.

The bottom line is the models are flimsy, the scientists tweaking them are biased toward a result. We do not yet understand the dynamics of the earth's climate, we aren't really sure what causes an ice age - we just know that they repeat about every 100,000 years.

Sure - get off fossil fuels ASAP - we're exhausting the earth's supply and they pollute.

Sure, temps are rising. Are we the cause? Maybe. It really doesn't matter since we need to get off fossil fuel anyway.

And it obstructs the larger issue : what if an ice age is just around the corner no matter what? Warm periods typically last 10,000 years and we're at the end of that cycle now.

Park your Prius and ask the big question: For the first time ever, we can see an ice age coming. How do we adapt to it?

Some of these beliefs may be counter to yours, or even piss you off. Not to worry, check with me in five years and I doubt I'll agree with them all too.

Growth is change.


Mar 12, 2014

Does "post-verbal" communication exist between us and our social platforms?

No - I think our (text-based) social platforms lack critical components of communication.

Emotionally charged topics demand the full range of our communication powers.

I try to be selective about what!s written, telephoned or discussed in person.


Mar 16, 2014

In John Gaddis' book, Surprise, Security and the American Experience, he argues that the only truly impacting moments in history come from a great shock, like the attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11. How is this still relevant in America today?

I would argue that not once did a great shock change the course of American history. Gladdis' book is best used to prop up a wobbly table.

Shocks may have been propaganda tools, but the root causes had been simmering for years :

American Revolution: Neither the Boston Massacre nor the closing of Boston Harbor caused it. Ambitious men such as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and others had been plotting independence for years.

The American Civil War: Tensions between North and South had been brewing since the founding of a tenuous federal union.

World War II : FDR wanted to get in the war for quite some time, and Pearl Harbor finally gave him the headlines he needed to free his hand. Strange how those ships weren't out patrolling whilst all the aircraft carriers were far away, unescorted. Not saying, just saying.

Invasion of Iraq. Cheney and his group of neocons had drawn up invasion plans of Iraq even before Bush was elected, claiming that the US needed to start securing the oil producing Mideast to assure American dominance into the 21st century.


Suprises make the headlines, but long-term agenda makes history.


Mar 20, 2014

What's the fastest humans can travel in a spaceship and how far could they travel?

Time slows down for a traveller as they approach the speed of light.

So, for example, you can travel a million light years in a week (according to your watch.). You'll have aged just seven days.

However, when you return to earth you'll find that all your friends are dead and that two million years have passed.

So there is no limit how far you can go, only how far in earth's future you want to return.


Mar 21, 2014

How do you handle giving your marketing team access to static pages?

You may want to write a script that archives all the static stuff once per day.

So in unix you could write a cron job to make a tar file with the date added to the end.


Mar 21, 2014

What's the best way to do web development in Ubuntu while having the ability to preview your work easily?

I use Ubuntu server on both target machine and my laptop.

Then I use chrome with one of many free plugins to clear the cache.


Mar 23, 2014

What do you think about people, that you have no connection with whatsoever, who randomly contact you on Facebook?

I think they must be ignored by everyone.

People who fish for personal info - for purposes ranging from identity theft to marketing - often use this technique.

Once on your friend's list they might have access to your phone number, email, hometown, etc.

What's worse - they can now target your friends. When your friend receives a friend invite they see you as a mutual friend, trust the person and accept it.

So ignore them to protect yourself and your friends.


Mar 24, 2014

Why do climate deniers and religious creationists repeatedly abuse the definition of scientific theory?

Dogma is not scientific.

Scientifically, we should be willing to question anything. Again and again,

In the case of Evolution, more and more evidence keeps coming in, in favor of the hypothesis that species have evolved to their current state over time.

As for Climate Change - well - have you been scientiific? Have you seen the models - peeked at the ice core data? Do you know that scientists have resigned from the IPCC in protest over their conclusions? That a famous climatologist from MIT is a "denier"?

Seen stuff like this?


To cast doubt on the hypothesis of man-made climate change? Is that science?

Or heresy?


Mar 25, 2014

How am I supposed to react to my boyfriend's apparent unhappiness with my boob size? He said, "I miss big boobs and having a lot to grab." I was pretty stunned. He followed it up with suggesting I get plastic surgery. I am a C, so not too flat.

Let it become your ex-boyfriend's problem.


This is a huge red flag. He's telling you he is unhappy with your body (you) and suggesting you get invasive surgery which may or may not come out well. A surgery which - at the cup size of C - an ethical doctor may refuse to perform.

All of this speaks to very dark and selfish tendencies. The word "toxic" applies.


Mar 26, 2014

Will science ever be able to explain everything? Or is there an intrinsic mystery to the universe?

Technically, no. One can build a Turing Machine, and the 'Halting problem' (does a given program stop?) is undecidable.

This is a bit sneaky, however.


Mar 29, 2014

Should Quora throttle the site against foreign users whose sometimes unreadable English lessens the quality of Quora answers?

Just to add to the chorus : No.

Non-English speakers may have valuable knowledge and perspective to offer.

We should welcome and encourage them - even if we need to edit their English for grammar and spelling.

It's a big world - it would be a shame to shut it out.


Mar 31, 2014

Should I be concerned about being around e-cigarettes in close proximities or enclosed places like buses?

There is no need for concern as Miles Dolphin points out.

E-cigs are new and social protocols are just emerging. I vape (use e-cigs), and find that a little discretion goes a long way.

I think if you're uncomfortable being in a closed space with somebody vaping, it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to put it away. And I think the vape-er is obliged by courtesy to put it away.

(Rather than being asked nicely, I was once shouted at it in a restaurant that I must put it away. I refused and defiantly blew billows of vapor into the lights as Jill Uchiyama witnessed. i was being a dick because I was yelled at.)

But mutual politeness serves us well as society figures out how to handle this new device.


Apr 1, 2014

Do smoking bans apply to e-cigarettes? Why?

No.

E-cigs do not produce smoke. Nothing is burning - rather, a liquid is being heated to produce vapor.

The vapor looks like smoke but since it isn't the result of combustion it legally is not covered by anti-smoking regulations.

The result in the US is a mish-mash of regulation concerning e-cigs. Chicago has banned them in enclosed, public places. Most cities haven't.

Some towns have banned them in restaurants. Most haven't.

For the time-being, restaurants and cafes each set their own policy..

It is explicitly banned on airplanes because it could be mistaken for a fire.
But I've never had an objection in an airport, shopping mall or taxi.


Apr 5, 2014

Is it a good thing or a bad thing for someone like Barbara Ehrenreich to write something like this on 9/11?: "‎I interrupt this mawkish, self-congratulatory commemoration to remind you that 9/11 ushered in one of the ugliest periods... [more]?

She's right.


Apr 6, 2014

How did John Nash overcome schizophrenia?

Nash combated his illness a number of ways :

It faded over time. Researchers are still trying to figure out if this always happens naturally or as a result of effort.

Nash practiced what he called a "diet of the mind." He learned to recognize the voices he heard (unlike the movie Beautiful Mind, his hallucinations were auditory, not visual. He didn't see people who weren't there, just heard them.) He also misinterpreted visual cues (a red tie signifies a communist spy.). He learned to recognize these thoughts. So Nash would refuse to listen to the voices or respond to them and would reject paranoid thoughts, refusing to follow them in his mind.

He created for himself a life where he was engaged in society (he would hang around Princeton doing math and sometime talking to students.) So he "normalized" his world.

As he got better, in his later years, he taught math to keep himself grounded and have something to do.

It's not clear what external remedies (insulin shock and medications) did to help him, if anything.


Apr 7, 2014

What were the benefits and pitfalls of Manifest Destiny in the US?

Bluntly, the benefits were that European settlers got a vast tract of land on which to form history's most powerful nation.

The pitfall is that humans who were living meaningful lives were driven into oblivion in a shameful act of near (?) genocide.


Apr 9, 2014

How do I smoke on an airplane?

Ok - I hesitate to give this answer because smoking on an airline is incredibly stupid with the rare exception of airlines that allow it.

You can be fined, arrested, blacklisted - the smoke may be mistaken for a real fire or terrorist activity (Richard Reid).

Nicotine gum will serve you well.

To answer your question, George Carlin wrote an article called "How to smoke weed on a plane and get away with it".

The plane is pressurized. The sink in the lavatory empties into a non pressurized region, so when the drain is open there is a strong airflow out of the cabin. If you can keep the cigarette close to the drain, the drain is open, and you exhale directly into it, you might not set off the smoke dictator.

Don't try this. At least a hundred other people are trying to get somewhere.

Nicotine gum will stave off withdrawal.

Don't be a dick.


Apr 10, 2014

Do user generated content sites such as Quora epitomize the dark side of Silicon valley and the internet economy?

About as hyprocritical as making free use of that site to publish such a screed - er - question.


Apr 10, 2014

What is your one-sentence solution to terrorism? Your entire answer must be one sentence.

Kill your television.


Apr 11, 2014

What is preventing you from coming to the May 30th TW Open House at Quora HQ, and how can we help?

Cost and other commitments around that time.

What I think would help a lot of people would be :

Subsidy on ticket fare.

Negotiate a cost break on a group of hotel rooms and perhaps rent a shuttle back and forth.

One or two alternative dates for those who can't make it.


Apr 12, 2014

What are the best examples of British understatement, i.e., striking British phrases actually used often by Brits?

It was common during the WWII bombing of London for a store which had been partially damaged - say, the roof blown off and maybe a missing wall - to remain in business with the sign,

"More open than usual."


Apr 12, 2014

Is there any honor left in joining the United States Military?

Even liberals who vehemently oppose government involvement in foreign wars generally have deep respect for the soldiers themselves and the military remains a highly regarded profession across the political spectrum.

A common example of this is the peacenik's sign : "Support our troops - bring them home."


Apr 13, 2014

Why did the USA abolish slavery?

Slavery was being abandoned worldwide and was on the decline in America.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin changed the economics of cotton production in south, especially from 1830-1860. By 1860 2/3 of the world's cotton was picked by American slaves and processed by the cotton gin. So America reverted while the world progressed beyond slavery.

The American Civil War resulted and finally put a stop to it.


Apr 18, 2014

If the United States has used a "surgical strike" on Syria, is this the equivalent of the US declaring war?

Declaring war is mostly a 20th century artifact.

Our undeclared wars include Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and I could go on and on.

This doesn't even touch upon all the covert operations the public never learns of.

America has been running around the globe blowing shit up for 60 years. Total declarations of war : zero.


Apr 18, 2014

How would a novel writer rewrite this sentence: “He emerged from the dark corner of the room and he simply nodded and then he proceeded to leave a room, but before leaving he said: ‘I know.’”?

He nodded and walked out.


Apr 20, 2014

What is the most diplomatic way to get people at work to stop smoking electronic cigarettes?

Firstly, get your facts straight.

E-cigs don't give off smoke. They don't combust anything - nothing is burning.
They also don't give off water vapor. They emit propylene-glycol and/or vegetable glycerin vapor, and a trace amount of nicotine. That is very unlike "weak cigarettes" which give off smoke and carbon monoxide.

The tobacco companies did not introduce e-cigs. They originates in China and only recently did Lorillard in the USA acquire an e-cig company.

Their scent does not stick to clothes, hair, or cause one's nose to run and eyes to burn.

Far from being under the radar they are under review by the FDA.

OK. So they aren't weak smoke. You aren't being punked by the tobacco companies. There is no known health risk to second-hand vapor. They are not generally illegal to use inside.

And you don't like it. You don't need them to stop - you don't like it. Maybe you don't like the smell or find it distracting.

Ask them. Nicely. Crazy, I know, but you might be amazed at the results. I use e-cigs in restaurants and have been asked to put it away - which I did without argument. One place yelled at me and I refused in defiance. You catch more flies with honey every time.

Your boss is free to ban them from the office but you say you already asked him and he won't. So that one is out for you.

Ask for your desk to be moved away from them.

Lose. You have no right to a perfect world where people do whatever you want.


Apr 21, 2014

Does the US Constitution support moral relativism or moral objectivism?

The Constitution itself is a massive work of "relativism", which carries negative undertones. I'll call it "mixed morality" rather than absolute.

It was the result of years of debate and compromise, and the Amendments to it show this mostly clearly. The amendments are basically a big "oops - we need to give more power to the states and the citizens."

Does power rest with the Federal Government or the States? Yes and no. Some powers rest with the federal government, others are reserved for the states, still others are "concurrent" and shared.

Is power in Congress allocated based on population? (One man, one vote. My vote holds no more sway than yours.)

Yes and no. In the House of Representatives votes are assigned to each state by population. In the Senate they get 2 per state, regardless of size.

Do people elect the president ? Absolutely. Unless they happen to elect a complete lunatic, in which case the Electoral College can toss out their decision.

The problem with "absolute" versus "mixed" morality is that absolute morality doesn't exist. Moral imperatives come into conflict and we have to call a tie and come up with something,


Apr 21, 2014

How do I grammatically analyse 'Ukraine push against rebels grinds to halt'?

This is hard-to-understand (and incorrect.) English, so don't feel badly.

"Grinds to halt" = "stops".

"Ukraine's push against rebels" = Ukraine fighting rebels.

So it means Ukraine stopped fighting the rebels.


Apr 23, 2014

Should hate speech be protected under the free speech amendment?

Yes.

A bigot can be ignored.

A censor cannot.


Apr 23, 2014

My config folder does not have monitors.xml in ubuntu 12.04? How do I set up my dual monitors?

It should be there.

does

ls ~/.config/monitors.xml

return anything ?


Apr 23, 2014

What are biggest misconceptions about forensic science?

That the term "Forensics" relates to death or murder. Blood stains, DNA samples, etc.

It refers to the detection of any crime and literally means "related to the courts."


Apr 24, 2014

What are some witty and amusing things you have heard on an airplane from air hostesses, pilots, or passengers?

"Please look around the cabin area for any belongings or small children you may have on board today."

"Your life jacket may be inflated by pulling on these two cords. For you over-achievers, you can also inflate it yourself by blowing into this tube."

(In the last days of People's Express, a discount airline which kept missing its schedule) :

"We are at a complete loss to explain our on-time arrival in Newark ..."


Apr 24, 2014

Who is the funniest Top Writer on Quora?

I gotta vote Sanjay Sabnani on this one ...


Apr 24, 2014

What single photo best depicts human nature?

Police rush to aid fallen elderly runner while others fan out, guns drawn. Boston Marathon bombing, 2013.


Heroism. Villany. Conflict. Danger. Decency.

This picture has it all.


Apr 28, 2014

Capitalism: Why has the capitalist system won out over other organizational models?

We must be careful here - the competition isn't over. You owe them three grand.

China now has the second largest economy (the US being the largest.) It is emerging as a superpower. China has lent the USA 1.3 trillion dollars.

That's over 3 thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the USA.

China's industrial output exceeded the US's in Sep of 2013.

China's rise had been rapid and there is little sign of it slowing in this century.


Apr 29, 2014

Considering that Earth's age is about 4.5 billion years and humanity's is about 200 thousand years, is it possible that intelligent species lived on Earth before humans, but self-destructed or left Earth for other planets?

It is not just possible, it is certain.

Neanderthal tamed fire, made and used tools before homosapiens did.


May 18, 2014

Is cheap wine more addictive than quality wine?

No.

The factors that affect the the addictiveness of alcohol are :

Quantity and duration of alcohol consumed.

Genetic predisposition.

Sometimes, an underlying, untreated psychiatric disorder (especially anxiety).


It's all about the individual and the alcohol in their blood stream.

The price tag on the bottle doesn't enter into it.


May 18, 2014

As someone with thousands of Quora followers, and many hundreds or thousands of relatively popular answers, do you still appreciate or even notice upvotes?

Every single one.

I never got even a little numb to it.


May 18, 2014

Where did Ubuntu come from?

Mark Shuttleworth made a fortune ($500M) during the dot-com boom with a company that sold digital certificates.


In 2004 he shoveled a pile of cash into a company called Canonical whose
mission was to create a Linux distribution which was simple and intuitive enough for the average user.

Ubuntu was born.


May 19, 2014

What will be the one- or two-sentence history of America's global war on terror 100 years from now?

America became addicted to foreign intervention during the Cold War.

When the enemy disappeared, America invented a new one - invisible, flagless, invariably situated on petroleum sources.


May 19, 2014

What's the average insurance for a 16 old on a moped? (and I don't want links to web sites or advice I just want a rough idea)

Zero.

In every state I'm aware of, mopeds do not require insurance of any kind, only that the driver has an automobile license and the moped is registered as such.


May 19, 2014

Was the Soviet Union's command economy successful?

It failed miserably, despite massive natural resources like land and oil.

Wheat would rot in the field unharvested. The Soviets had to import it.

Factories that produced unneeded, obsoleted machine parts kept running.

Shortages of basic necessities were common and people would wait in lines for hours to obtain the most basic items.

A Soviet joke made the rounds just before the collapse.

Two men are waiting in line for toilet paper. Hours go by and one declares, "I'm leaving! I'm going to go kill Gorbachev!"

Two more hours elapse and the man returns. His friend asks, "So? Did you kill him?"

"No. That line was even longer."


May 20, 2014

Why did it take humanity thousands of years to discover electricity, or invent the telephone, television, computers, cars, and other modern conveniences?

Most of the humans that have ever existed are alive right now.

A minority of the total mental activity of our species lies in our past.

The accomplishments of the dead minority put the living majority to shame.

We should perhaps ask the opposite question : how did fewer people get from the wilderness to the moon?


May 23, 2014

How did World War II and the Cold War comparatively impact the US?

World War II ended the isolationism that prevailed in America in reaction to WW 1. (70% of Americans were opposed to US involvement prior to Pearl Harbor. "America first" was the slogan of the day.

America emerged from WW II with women part of the work force and industry running white-hot: e.g., we owned half the world's gold and produced 80% of its automobiles.

We were the sole nuclear power.

From isolationist to global collasus in less than a decade, the US found itself in the grips its own Military Industrial Complex. This new beast wanted to keep living, and to grow.

The Cold War fed the beast : Proxy wars broke out with the USSR (Korea, Vietnam).

WWII made a warrior nation out of an isolationist industrial power; the Cold War made this permanent.

US military expenditure remains nearly equal to all other nations combined.

"America first" was lost to 1941 and never heard of again.


Jun 2, 2014

If a cancer survivor (3 years out) moves in with a heavy smoker, then begins smoking again, herself, and gets cancer again within three months time, can we blame that directly on the smoking?

No - there isn't a case of cancer on earth that can be completely attributed to exposure to carcinogenic substances like tobacco.

It's about probabilities. Tobacco use greatly increases your chances of getting lung and other cancers. But cancer can also pop up out of nowhere (RIP, Steve Jobs).

A survivor is at especially high risk of spontaneous relapse.

So smoking again may indeed have been the cause, and was definitely a shockingly bad idea.

But we cannot conclude causation. To do that, we'd have to go back in time and have this same person not smoke and watch the results.

In this case, I think, we cannot even posit probable causation given the person's history of cancer and relatively brief resumption of smoking.


Jun 4, 2014

Is the use of social media today more of an expression of narcissism? Or is it just another platform for communication and interaction? Should it be?

I personally reject the notion that social media heralds a new age of narcissism.

The primary reason we use Facebook and Twitter is our interest in our friends, not ourselves. A status update takes a minute - most people spend much more time than that seeing what others have to say.


Jun 29, 2014

My girlfriend is mad at me for "not standing up for her.” She accidentally spilled her drink on a girl in the club. The other girl threw her drink on my girlfriend and her boyfriend shoved me. I grabbed my girlfriend and we left. What should I do?

I recently had a similar experience, did as you did and make no apologies for it.

The manly (and womanly) thing to do is defuse the situation and walk away. A female author whose name escapes me wrote, "True masculinity is power under control."

This is clearly evident with "first responders" (Police, EMT's, fire-fighters.)
They exude calm and keep their cool when nobody else is. They proceed straight to the core of the problem, which might be applying pressure to a wound but is more often just putting distance between two people about to go at it.

You did stand up for your girlfriend. But she didn't want to stand. She wanted to be on the ground of a meaningless conflict.

She needs to learn to stand on her own two feet.


Jul 3, 2014

Why do vaporizers produce fewer carcinogens than smoking?

The primary carcinogen is TSNA (Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines) Tobacco-specific nitrosamines.

Suprisingly, there is very little of this in the tobacco leaf in it's natural state. It occurs when the leaf is heated and/or fermented. So when you're burning tobacco, your heating it and the sm0ke is full of TSNA.

Also, most tobacco products (including chewing tobacco) are fire cured which creates TSNA's. They are also fermented.

E-cigs contain nicotine extracted from tobacco without heating or fermentation. So only trace amounts of TSNA remains - similar to that of nicotine gum.


Jul 4, 2014

I want to try using nicotine e-cigarettes. How do I start?

Nicotine is vastly more addictive than caffeine or amphetamines like methylphenidate.

Don't self medicate with it. Ask your doctor or psychiatrist - and they can help you find safe solutions.

I didn't answer your question.

I hope you speak to a doctor before somebody does.


Jul 13, 2014

What are some self-defense tips everyone should know?

Turn sideways. Especially if the attacker has a knife or blunt weapon, people tend to step back, leaving their abdomen and face exposed. Turn, don't back up.

If pushed, PULL. Don't push back, rather turn sideways and pull them in the same direction. This uses their energy against them and they usually stumble forward and land on their face.

Learn to do a WRIST RELEASE. If your wrist is grabbed, make a circular motion with your hand. Even the strongest attacker is forced to abandon their grip.


Jul 14, 2014

Are there any negatives to being a Top Writer?

There is a sense of pressure to write quality answers and to be an example of Quora's culture and rules - especially BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful). There is a sense we must re-earn that badge with every post and comment.

In the end these are good things, but can be a bit daunting at first.


Jul 14, 2014

Which cheap and common (non-electronic) household items have interesting stories?

The humble can opener was invented (1858) nearly fifty years AFTER the tin can (1810). People used hammers or chisels to bash cans open till then.


Jul 14, 2014

What is the ultimate irony?

Earth periodically goes through long ice ages (about 100,000 years) interrupted by warm spells of about 10,000 years.

Life flourishes in these global summers.

The most recent one, which we are currently in (and approaching the end of) gave rise to civilization : naked bipeds so intelligent and adaptable they spread to every habitable part of the planet. They even walked on the moon.

They were so disruptive to other species and the ecosystem that they created Earth's sixth mass extinction, now being called the Anthropocene (human) Mass Extinction.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/01/opinion/sunday/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction.html?_r=0

This summer was deadly.


Jul 18, 2014

If some men don't talk about their feelings, what do they talk about?

Do men talk about their feelings less? Most do, yea.

Is it sad? Not at all.

"Talking about your feelings" is a very 20th century invention. Starting with Freud and devolving into the self-help book industry in the 70's.

The mythology that emerged is that feelings are things we must talk frequently about or else we're REPRESSING (Freud's term) and they build up and explode or something.

The fact is most feelings are fleeting, Talking about them all the time can make them WORSE, causing a person to ruminate over them, resent others, or provoke a reaction in their relationships.

Feelings aren't facts. They aren't emergencies that require the attention of yourself and others.

A kid drops an ice cream cone, cries and complains how much he was enjoying it.

An adult says "Oh, fuck." And walks on to the next thing.

Maybe to a beach.

Which always puts them in a good mood.


Jul 19, 2014

Are straight men afraid of gay men?

Yes.

They dress well, cook well, and don't make a mess everywhere.

Our girlfriends look at them, then look at us, roll their eyes and sigh.


Jul 20, 2014

What is an example of something true that nobody generally wants to admit?

A firm belief in Alien life is unscientific, given a lack of any scientific evidence so far to support it.

The population of the earth is so high now that it is straining the planet's supply of fuel, food and clean water. See TED talk, "The earth is full."

The American colonists did not hold their ground at the outbreak of The Revolutionary War. They had turned and were in retreat before any shot was fired; badly outnumbered by professional soldiers. The "shot heard round the world" may have been a dropped musket discharging, or a sniper from afar. Both sides disobeyed orders not to fire.

America grew wealthy through territorial aggression against the natives and Mexico. Also through slavery.

It's basically impossible to stop a nuclear bomb from coming to our shores in an ordinary cargo ship. We lack the means to scan every container and a properly shielded device would be hard to detect even if we did. Which doesn't matter because by the time we can scan it, it's already here and could blow up the port city in which it's harbored.

Through Earth's geological history, ice ages are the normality and warm periods like this (inter-glacial) are exceptional and short-lived. New York City is normally under a mile of ice.

Neanderthal had a bigger brain than humans and tamed fire before we did.

The Ebola virus has been seen to become airborne among chimpanzees at a research facility in the USA. The virus travelled through the air ducts and infected the control group of healthy chimps. All of them had be put down for safety reasons. If the human form of the virus were to undergo a similar mutation, it could wipe out civilization due to the > 90% mortality rate.

When we look at stars from earth, we are NOT seeing them as they were in the past. According to Relativity, we are seeing them as they are NOW, from our frame of reference. Einstein melded the notions of time and space; "when" is only meaningful in the context of "where".

We are due to encounter severe oil shortages within about 30 years, which will wreak havoc on the world's economy. (For example, our modern farming system is dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides, and processing). We will run out of petroleum entirely within a century, perhaps much sooner. The only viable alternative (now known) is tens of thousands of nuclear plants, or another source of hydrocarbons (like methane 'frozen' on the floor of our oceans.) See Hubbart's peak. To be fair, new sources of oil (like shale) may delay the peak by a couple of decades, but it's coming: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil


Jul 20, 2014

What's the difference between a rival and a competitor?

A rival wants to win.

A competitor wants you to lose.


Jul 21, 2014

Is smoking a half a pack a day half as harmful to your health as smoking one pack a day?

Cancer risks are roughly linear with # cigarettes smoked, so yes - fewer cigarettes are less harmful.

I don't know about other ailments like heart disease.

Plus, there's a fly in the ointment of reducing number of cigarettes. People tend to compensate by inhaling more deeply and holding it in. It's conceivable to inflict the same damage on your body with half the cigarettes.

But I don't mean to discourage you. Cutting down is a good step toward quitting. Keep reducing.

When you get to zero, you can smoke half of that any day :)


Jul 24, 2014

Why don't cops arrest shirtless women in gay pride parades?

Where it is illegal : Let me offer this.

Before pot was decriminalized in Boston, there were annual legalize-marijuana rallies. Thousands of people were openly smoking pot in violation of the law.

The cops just stood back.

Why? Because cops are just trying to get through their shift. The weed smokers weren't hurting anyone.

So, they ignore it, the festival ends, nobody is harmed and the cops make it home to dinner.

The alternative? Get 300 more cops, move in and start arresting people. Some resist and get hurt. Protestors move out of the assigned area into the streets. Maybe some throw rocks at police windshields. Maybe a riot breaks out. Property gets damaged. 500 more cops are now needed to fan out into the streets.

The police are not willing to trade a peaceful, contained situation for a conflict which is out of control. They have made the best choice to protect their community.


Jul 26, 2014

Does science require faith in some aspects just as religion does? If so, in what aspects?

Yes.

Science is grounded on inductive reasoning. That what happened before will happen again. Experiments are repeatable.

Which certainly seems to be the case. But let's pause for a second.

Induction has always worked in the past, so it must work next time. We are caught in circular reasoning. The only support for induction is induction itself.

Science puts its faith in induction : that the laws of the universe are constant.


Jul 29, 2014

Do disposable e-cig vaporizers produce more vaping byproducts than non-disposable ones?

They produce less.

Generally speaking, a disposable e-cig produces less vapor (and is an expensive piece of junk IMO that doesn't supply enough nicotine to get a smoker off tobacco.)


Jul 29, 2014

Can one dilute nicotine to be vaporized with water instead of PG/VG?

Stop!

You're about to ruin your device, and maybe your battery.

Water is much more highly conductive than smoke juice. Adding water will short your coils, and possibly your battery.

Don't even use water to clean, use 91% isopropyl (alcohol).

Dilute juice with zero nicotine juice of the same flavor.


Jul 30, 2014

What are some commonly used computer/programming terms?

Reboot : Used in common parlance to mean "start over". Especially common in reference to a movie being redone.


Spin up/down : To come up to speed/to relax and stop doing something.


Ping : To contact someone, as in "Let me ping him."


Multitask.


Bandwidth : A person's ability to absorb information.


Aug 3, 2014

How come some people think that it's unreasonable to ask a potential date to submit to a background check?

I'm torn between Aaron Ellis's excellent answer (go read!) and seeing some merit in a background check. You don't know this person, so there are some valid safety concerns.

Fortunately, sex-offenders (the most dangerous in a dating situation most likely) are required to register, and you can access this information without their knowledge or consent.

Also, intuition plays a role. Follow your gut.

Culturally, it's a non starter. We feel it's an an invasive and inappropriate prelude to romance. That may change as online dating grows, but that's just how most people feel.

There is also a certain backlash. Freud called it 'projection'". Bono said "a liar is one who won't believe anyone else."

Displaying this much suspicion is an indicator that you are the one hiding a dark past (thus assuming others do as well.)


Aug 22, 2014

Why is alcoholism typically regarded as a problem? I am a full blown and proud alcoholic. My work is not affected; I'm a happy person. I am in shape. I exercise every day so I can keep it up without getting fat.

You drink to a light buzz every night?

Then binge on vacations?

You're not addicted to alcohol. Yet. You're not an alcoholic in clinical terms.

Clinical definitions aside, here's another definition : You can't enjoy life without alcohol.

Which makes you rather dull. A frat-boy's view of life.

Your wife wants a man. Who has fun sober.

Your inability to relax and have fun without alcohol will probably lead you to alcoholism down the road. Drinking in the morning. Blackouts. A decline in mental and physical health which will desolate your life until it ends early.

It comes on without sign-posts. It emerges as a series of little problems.

Like complaints from your wife.


Aug 25, 2014

What is the best possible way to explain to my seven-year-old daughter that I won't quit drinking? I am a proud and functioning alcoholic and I'm fine with that.

I was going to write a different kind of answer than the others. Something like, "Your choices are your own, plenty of people drink in moderation, your wife objecting to it may or may not be valid, in any case this is not something either of you should mention to the child. Your answer should be "that's just a disagreement between me and mommy. Nothing to do with you. We both love you."

But then I read this line, "Of course, I was drunk at the time so I told her I'd call her back."

You. Drunk. During the day. As a matter of course.

Failing as a Dad (what if she needed a ride to the ER for a broken wrist?).

You're proud? Won't change?

There is nothing you can say. But there is much you can do.

Would you let a strange man snatch your daughter from your hands and take off with her? Of course not.

But you're letting the bottle do it.

I urge you to get help.


Aug 27, 2014

If you were a parent, would you be more upset if your child came out as an atheist or gay/lesbian? Why?

Neither would upset me in the least.

Raising a child to discover their own orientation and beliefs is my definition of parenthood.

I would celebrate these turning points (mile stones) in their development.


Sep 6, 2014

Compared to previous administrations, has the Obama administration done a better or worse job of addressing racism in the United States?

Racism in the US hasn't really been a federal issue since Johnson's back to back civil right's bills completed the work of the civil war.

Racism still remains, but as a cultural issue (plenty of whites won't eat with blacks) and micro-economic (companies don't consider the black candidate for CEO.)


Sep 6, 2014

Do some Americans believe Israelis are inferior to them, because Israel is small, and some may think it is a worthless country that's dependent on the USA?

Um, no.

The general sense in the US is that Israelis are tough as nails. The virtuosity of their pilots is legendary, and when the US set about tightening airport security, they called Mossad.

The aid (dependence) really began during the Yom Kippur war, which came close to escalating into nuclear conflict.

America needs Israel to thrive as a trusted ally in the world's most conflicted region which exports most of the world's oil.


Sep 7, 2014

Why is Ebola so difficult to contain in Western Africa?

In addition to Gabriel Seah's great answer,

We can't find the source of Ebola (and related) viruses.

It's coming from somewhere. A family of monkeys, a swamp, a tree frog.

But so far nobody has found it.


Sep 8, 2014

Like Neanderthal & cro magnon, will current human species also become extinct?

It's possible both species will come to the same end :

Death at the hand of Homo Sapien.


Sep 9, 2014

What are some elevator hacks?

If the doors are about to close, just hit the up (or down) button. They'll pop wide open again.

This is especially fun when someone in the elevator saw you coming but opted to ignore you.


Sep 9, 2014

What are some things that feminists don't understand about men? What are the prejudices feminists hold about men?

That most men, historically, have been equally disempowered by a small group of wealthy men.

No land, no vote, no protection by the law.


Sep 9, 2014

Do programmers, after 10 mins of browsing for a solution to their problem, ever slap their foreheads and mutter to themselves, "I'm an idiot"?

All the time.

Except devs for the most part don't "browse for solutions". Software is not the art of browsing for code snippets.

Rather, devs think hard at problems until they are solved.


Sep 11, 2014

Are the growing drop-out and unemployment rates among men in the U.S, an indirect result of feminist propaganda?

No.


Sep 11, 2014

What were the personalities of the Founding Fathers?

John Hancock : Aggressive smuggler, shifty, cunning.

Ben Franklin : Witty, urbane, a prankster with deep insight into human nature.

John Adams : a chip on his shoulder due to his humble origins, he was often pedantic and craved recognition.

Thomas Jefferson : The most complex person of the lot. Kept tearing his house down and rebuilding it until it was perfect. Brilliant. Capable of complete indifference to those around him (he had progeny on his estate with slaves, he would ignore most of them.)

George Washington : Prideful. Ambitious. Kept pleading he shouldn't be put in charge of things, but would do things like show up every day to the Continental Congress in full military dress, signaling his availability.


Sep 24, 2014

Will Earth always be habitable for us humans?

Humans have at the latest between 500 million and a billion years to get off the planet.

Our sun is getting brighter as it nears the end of its life and becomes a red giant. This will heat the earth.

Within a half billion years almost all plant life will die, and humans would need some exotic technology to live here, though most likely we'd be gone (to another planet or oblivion).

In a billion years the atmosphere will disappear and the oceans will boil off, and there won't be anything left alive.

Interesting, complex multicellular life existed for 500 million years, and has another 500 million years left on Earth.

We are halfway to Earth's expiration date.


Sep 24, 2014

Are e-cigarettes worth using when trying to quit smoking? How long does it take to quit smoking using e-cigs?

I was a pack-a-day smoker for 30 years.

I transitioned over to e-cigs over the course of a year.


Sep 25, 2014

Is the recent popular movement from paper cigarettes to electronic cigarettes a result of the tobacco settlement and our recent willingness to push the tobacco industry a little harder to give better options on the supply side?

Nothing that complicated or macro-economic.

Individual smokers are switching to e-cigs because they are not as unhealthy as cigarettes, are much cheaper, generally acceptable to use indoors, and leave no odor or stains on the smoker.

E-cigs more closely simulate smoking than any other nicotine replacement, so many smokers find the switch easy.


Sep 28, 2014

Why are cigarettes still sold even though they are harmful? Do humans just not care about it anymore?

There are still enough smokers to swing an election at the state or federal level.


Oct 4, 2014

What are some electronic cigarette recommendations?

As a former 30 year smoker who found the switch to e-cigs *effortless*, and tried a dozen different systems, I can say this ;

Of all the cigarette-sized e-cigs I tried, the Logic brand delivered the most vapor, coming closest to satisfying my nicotine craving. The end does light up blue - that can actually be a plus when using it indoors (which you can still usually do). If it lights up red, emulating a real cigarette too closely, you'll get hassled by people who think you're smoking. You may be able to mod in a red light - check the web.

Cigarette sized e-cigs didn't deliver enough nicotine, nor last long enough - both battery and cartridge. to get me off cigarettes. I would consider dropping the requirement it look like a cigarette.

Here's my setup. A Kanger Protank II attached to a KangerTech Evod battery, 1100 mah. It lasts all day, is durable, and delivers enough vapor that I don't want to smoke tobacco. 5 months without a cigarette and I didn't have to put effort into it, vaping simply became preferable.


Oct 7, 2014

If you quit smoking full-time and continue to socially smoke, are you just keeping yourself addicted to nicotine and therefore causing yourself unnecessary stress on the days you don't smoke?

I have never seen a full time (fully addicted) smoker go back to occasional smoking in the long-term.

In every case, after a month or two they are right back where they started.

There seems to be some addictive 'pathway' in the brain that dies off slowly (years, not months) only through complete abstinence.

By indulging occasionally you feed the beast and prolong the time you have to resist it.

I don't know the scientific explanation (if there is one), this is just my experience with fully addicted smokers.

I've never met a counter-example in my life and I'm 40 ... something.

Besides, what is social smoking? So 3 friends are smoking and you aren't - who cares?


Oct 7, 2014

Why hasn’t anyone invented tires that don't wear?

Either the road or the tire wears.

Something has to give.


Oct 7, 2014

How do I see the shell programming behind any command in Linux?

If a command is native, like "ls", you wont find a script for it. It's irreducible.

For commands that are scripts, say, "awesome", you can do "whereis awesome".

This will give you the location of the file, for example /usr/bin/awesome. So "cd /usr/bin" and then "cat ./awesome" does the trick.

Note that most scripts end in .sh, so the example above would most likely be "awesome.sh".

If you aren't the admin on the system, you may be denied read privileges and have to ask for them.


Oct 8, 2014

What do fire hydrants and car tires have in common?

If either fails to function, there can be dire consequences. So both must be regularly inspected ...


Oct 8, 2014

What does it say about a startup if it cycles through engineers quickly?

Iceberg, dead ahead.


Oct 9, 2014

What was Hitler's greatest triumph?

Shooting Adolph Hitler in the head.


Oct 9, 2014

Why does smoking cigarettes make me feel bad now? My first few times they made me feel good and stimulated me but now they make me tired, lazy and depressed.

Nicotine is both stimulant and neurotoxin. It was used as a nerve gas in WWI (nicotine sulfate.). It's still used as a pesticide. Nasty stuff.

Smoking also introduces carbon monoxide into your system. This disrupts the flow of oxygen throughout your body.

It seems reasonable that you might begin to react negatively. I can't tell you why this is happening just now.

But I can tell you - Great! It feels bad. It should, it's poison.

Quitting should be easy now. Go for it.


Oct 9, 2014

What are the signs of having a high metabolism?

I have one. I think I do at least. I'm not sure it's an actual medical term, but in popular culture it refers to someone who :

Eats a lot but does not gain weight.

Often has a lot of physical energy as a result.


Like an engine with the throttle open, it expends more energy and consumes more fuel.

Personally I have to consciously eat extra to keep from losing weight, and have trouble keeping still for more than twenty minutes.


Oct 12, 2014

Why is it that we rarely see cigarettes being sold out of a machine these days (in the US)?

To add to MGM's answer, many states banned cigarette sales to people under 18 decades ago.

These laws were largely ignored until the 80's, when a wave of anti-smoking activism applied pressure to start enforcing them.

Businesses got rid of cigarette machines, put cigs behind the counter and started ID-checks.

Unfortunately I was addicted for 5 years at the age of 18 when this happened in New England.


Oct 13, 2014

What are the most bizarre reasons for breaking up a relationship?

OK, in the end, I did the dumping. But here goes :

This was a woman getting a graduate degree from a world-famous university with notoriously fickle admissions.

One day, her cat pooped on her luggage. She asked me, "Did you get into a fight with my cat last night?"

My response, "I can't even imagine what a fight between a human and a cat looks like. Besides, I love animals."

But she persevered, trying to psychoanalyze the cat, to uncover the root cause of this feline evacuation so that I was somehow to blame.

Day 2 - more of the same. Calls to discuss the cat poop and how I may have brought it on.

Day 3 - same.

Days 4-5 : more cat poop.

Day 6 : She calls. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but ..." again with the cat poop.

It was a beautiful saturday. I looked at the bright sky, the trees, the butterflies skimming the grass, and at my phone blaring about cat poop.

I spoke into the mouth piece only long enough to break up, turned off my phone, and put it in my pocket. Never saw her again.


Oct 13, 2014

Which Top Writers 2014 are from the Seattle area?

None yet.

Top Writers were only selected for 2012 and 2013 as of Oct 13, 2014.


Oct 16, 2014

My boyfriend of 2 years doesn't like me talking to guys, controls me and is extremely jealous. He frequently asks me to send screenshots of my chat list on WhatsApp and becomes furious if he sees chats with a guy. What should I do?

To add to what others have said : jealousy and possessiveness (the desire to control) are born of three things.

Fear. Someone once said "The opposite of love is not hate - it is fear." He is afraid of a world he cannot control; afraid what it might do, say, or think. He cannot control the world so is channeling his energies toward his closest relationship - you.

Low self-esteem. He considers himself unworthy of you, so continually doubts your commitment.

Dishonesty and infidelity - on *his* part. Freud would call it 'projection', but U2 put it more simply : "A liar is one who won't believe anyone else." Our best estimation of others is ourselves. If we lie and cheat we naturally assume others are doing the same.


Fear, self-loathing and dishonesty are not problems you can fix (or should try).
He needs to be alone to sort this stuff out - and he may never will.

Being his girlfriend isn't helping him. It's stoking the fires - as others have said it's going to get worse.

As for yourself you deserve to be in a trusting relationship. The trust is not earned by repeated inspection - rather it must be granted freely and first. You can only destroy it yourself by cheating on him. Otherwise trust is your birth right in any relationship.

Here's a litmus test. You should be able to tell any boyfriend that you are going to have lunch with a male friend. The boyfriend should say something like "great! Have a nice time."

He doesn't ask how you know him. What you ate. Where you went. What time you finished. He doesn't text or call during.

When next you see him it's like nothing happened. Because nothing did. Just lunch with a friend.

Your freedom and your friendships belong to you. Don't give them away in a futile effort to fix someone.


Oct 16, 2014

I'm a social justice activist. I think that makes it hard to make friends because people constantly disagree with me. How can I make friends without silencing myself?

A friend is not someone who shares all of your beliefs. It is someone with whom you can disagree constructively.

For instance, I have the following very unpopular beliefs : Man-made global warming does not exist. We need to build thousands of nuclear generators. Affirmative action should be banned.

I could come up with more, but you get the idea. The thing is, I identify as a liberal. So many of my blue friends dispute these points. My red friends disagree on other matters.

It's OK. It would be very strange to have a friend whose world-view exactly matched mine.

And it has limits. For example, I would not befriend a racist. But these extreme cases are very rare in my experience.


Oct 18, 2014

What are the most convincing reasons for me not to accept that there is global warming?

OK, here goes.

The thesis that global warming is a result of man-made CO2 is open to legitimate criticism. We live in a culture where such skepticism is essentially considered heresy; this is both an unscientific and undemocratic trend.

First, let me be ad hominem. Anthropogenic global warming is refuted by MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen. Dr. Lindzen is a nationally famous luminary in his field, often called "The Dean" by his colleagues across the country. You can hear him speak on the topic here -

Second, let me try to be factual. Al Gore loves to go around the country showing this graph, which displays global temperature along with atmospheric CO2 levels. (This information is gleaned from ice core data in the arctic, see National Climatic Data Center) :

Yellow is temperature. Red is C02 in the atmosphere.

Wow. Sure looks like CO2 drives climate change. It even appears that CO2 is the only driver of climate change. So we're done - anyone who denies this is crazy, on-the-take from big oil, stupid, or all three.

As Columbo used to say in the old TV-series, "Um ... Just one more thing before I go, ma'am."

Isn't a little weird that CO2 is the only driver of climate change? Water vapor retains more heat, as does methane and sulfur dioxide. Strange.
But never mind that. Let's take those two graphs and plunk them on top of each other. Superimposing them gives :


OK, look really carefully. CO2 (blue) is lagging slightly behind temperature (red.) The average lag is 800 years.

A cause must precede an effect. The ice cores show temperature driving CO2 levels, and not the other way around.

And more than this. Look at the big red dip, around 125,000 years ago. Even though CO2 is at a peak level - the temperature dives, dragging CO2 down with it.

Put simply - CO2 is not seen to drive climate change in the past.

You might protest - but we *know* CO2 is a greenhouse gas. If we put more in the atmosphere, the temperature *must* increase. It's simple physics.

Too simple. The earth's climate is a complex system, involving feedback loops and mathematically "chaotic" behavior (Chaos in the Atmosphere). If we simply calculate the effect of CO2 added by humans to the atmosphere we get less than a degree Celsius of warming.

The thesis that the added CO2 will result in several degrees of warming is based on models which invoke feedback loops and "tipping points". This is very tricky business; very sensitive to assumptions and omitted dynamics (like cloud cover, ocean currents, etc.) We haven't got this complex mechanism figured out. We don't know how to model it. This is what happened when we tried :

So the projections don't seem to work. It's only 10 years - fair enough. But our models didn't exactly get a standing ovation from nature.

To recap : We don't see CO2 driving climate change in the past. Our attempt to predict it in the future failed. Oh - and what are temperatures doing dropping anyway, given that man-made CO2 emissions are at their highest ever?

"And one more thing, ma'am."

Take a look at the first two graphs. Those warm spikes - don't they seem to be pulsing ? Like there is some sort of rhythm involved? We might be so reckless as to use the term cyclic?

Last graph, I promise :


Oh. That top line is the shape of the earth's orbit. The earth's 0rbit changes shape in a rhythmic cycle, going from nearly circular to more eliptical and back again. These are called Milankovitch cycles.

The earth's orbit doesn't give a crap how hot or cold earth is or what's in its atmosphere. Nothing is going to push it around.

And this graph shows two things : Ice ages recur about every 100,000 years, just as the earth's orbit starts to become less eliptical. And ... we are right on schedule for another one.

So Dr. Lindzen - "The Dean" is not crazy. "Deniers" - can we call them skeptics? - are by no means crackpots. They should be heard. The future of mankind may depend on it.

If they are right - a new ice age is coming no matter what we do. So we must prepare for it; build lots of nuclear reactors, reduce global population, develop ways to produce food in cold climates. By running around chasing CO2 we are solving the wrong problem.

Our engines will be silenced soon enough by glaciers.


Oct 20, 2014

I am quitting my drinking habit and would like some input. I have not been shaking or anything as of yet, but it's been just today that I stopped. My plan is to have one drink if symptoms arise today and tomorrow, then quit. Is this a good plan?

It sounds like a plan, but be prepared to go to a hospital if necessary. Alcohol withdrawal is sometimes - if rarely - fatal.

Monitor your pulse and blood pressure if possible. If they are elevated, or if you experience tremors, you may need a medical detox.

Here you will be administered a sedative for up to five days which will alleviate the symptoms of withdrawal.
It's safer this way and why suffer if it's avoidable?

It's really individual, depending on how much you drank, how much you weigh, your gender, and how you personally respond to alcohol.

The problem with combating symptoms with a single drink is that an hour or two later, the withdrawal symptoms come back.

So by all means, try it on your own but be mindful of your reaction and ready to get medical help. Also, vitamin B complex is important right now; alcohol deprives your body of thiamine (B1) which regulates nerve functioning. You need the whole B-complex because they work together.

Best of luck to you and I applaud your decision.


Oct 21, 2014

What is the difference between left and right?

Deep question.

In simplest terms, “right” and “left” are directions relative to a human being, based on our symmetry :

Every human can easily find their “right” hand, so has a built-in “right”-pointing compass.

But what kind of symmetry is this? What is symmetry anyway?

Consider a simpler, completely 2-dimensional object – a square :

Imagine we're sitting at a table. Close your eyes a few seconds. I rotate the square by 90 degrees.

Or did I? When you open your eyes, you can't tell the difference. A square doesn't change when you rotate it 90 degrees.

The fancy term for an action which leaves a figure unchanged is automorphism. Literally, “self change”, or “change back to self.”

What other automorphisms can we find for the square? We can also rotate by 180 degrees. Or 270. Or 360. Oh – or we could leave it completely alone. So that's 5 different automorphisms we have found so far.

Our simple square is leading us into some heavy math. The set of five automorphisms form a mathematical construct called a Symmetry group. This is part of Group theoryinvented by the french prodigy Évariste Galois who died at the age of 20 before his mathematics was recognized. Now it's everywhere in physics, molecular biology, and lots of different areas.

Bear with me – I'm getting back to left and right soon.

Are there other ways to move the square that leave it unchanged – other automorphisms? Well, we could lift it off the table, flip it, and drop it back down. Is that legit? It depends whether we allow the 2-dimensional object to undergo a 3-dimensional operation. We see that there are higher dimensional automorphisms that higher dimensional super-beings (us) can do.

OK – seriously, I'm getting back to left and right. What's the difference between a left-and-right glove?

Is there an automorphism which will convert a left-glove into a right-glove? Hmm. After flipping a left glove every which way, we see that it remains a left glove. Ah hah! But if we turn it inside out, then we have a right glove.

But in the process of turning it inside-out, we temporarily deformed it. If the glove were metal we couldn't do this. Let's call that cheating, since we are trying to get at the universal difference between left and right. Automorphisms which bend the object aren't allowed. Only non-deforming, rigid automorphisms are allowed.

It's impossible to visualize, but just as the square has higher dimensional automorphisms, so does a glove. A 4-dimensional super-creature could pick up your 3-d left glove, flip it through the fourth dimension, and drop it back on the table. Presto : right-glove.

But don't hold your breath. Four-dimensional creatures are hard to come by. Absent their intervention – a left glove will never become a right one.

We can at least use this fact to define the difference between the gloves. Mathematically, we can say that a left glove can be flipped through 4-D space into a right glove; in 4-D space the two gloves are the same object which happen to be oriented differently. More practically for us 3-D creatures, a left glove looks like a right glove in a mirror.

We say the glove is “chiral” (greek for 'handed'). This means that there are mirror-images of it in the world, and they can't be converted by any flipping in 3-D space.

This seems like abstract naval-gazing, but stay with me as things are bout to get real.

Suppose the 4-D super-creature got mischievous and flipped you ? You'd be OK at first. Except most people appear left-handed. The trouble begins when you see a street sign :


Everything written down would now be backwards. You have to re-learn to read or use a mirror.

Good thing 4-D creatures keep to themselves. But there's another way to get your chirality flipped :

Consider the whole cosmos. We've all heard that the cosmos isn't infinite; it's only so wide. Well, people ask, what happens when you reach the edge? Do you bang into some kind of wall or what?

Physicists are still working out the details of this. All agree you don't smack into a wall. One theory asserts that you return to earth with your chirality reversed. You return right back where you started but you also underwent a flip in 4-D space.

So you can't read. Never mind that. You are about to starve.

Life is chiral.

Most of the molecules that compose life are 'handed.' For example, glucose fuels your brain and red blood cells. Glucose comes both left-and right-handed. One form, called D-glucose or simply “dextrose” (from the greek dexios meaning “right”) is the stuff that powers you and me :


Its left-handed brother is called L-glucose.


A (non-flipped) human won't absorb L-glucose.. It just passes right through. Interestingly, it tastes sweet. It would be a candidate for an artificial sweetener if it weren't so expensive to make. There are lots of organic compounds that are chiral like this.

Somewhere early in the evolution of life, the balance tipped in favor of one hand over the other. The cause of this remains a mystery and field of active research.

If you get your chirality reversed by a cross-Cosmos trek or a 4-dimensional prankster, dextrose won't nourish you. You need l-dextrose, which doesn't occur in nature (you need a lab to make it.) You will starve in this left-handed world. Sorry about that.

So life is right-handed. Strangely, so are subatomic particles.

A neutrino always spins the same way with respect to its momentum (the spin - counter-clockwise, is arbitrarily labelled "left-handed" in physics. This is mere convention, we could just as easily call it "right-handed.)

No neutrino spins clockwise. However, its anti-matter twin, the anti-neutrino, does.

After the big bang, there was lots of both : neutrinos and anti-neutrinos - spinning in both directions. All the anti-neutrinos collided into neutrinos , annihilating both. But there was an imbalance; slightly more neutrinos existed. After all the annihilation, they remained (this is true of all the other particles as well.) All of creation is the residue of this slight imbalance.

We were left with a cosmos full of particles but no anti-particles. And right-handed neutrinos.

Physicists call this symmetry breaking. It is one of the great mysteries of the big bang; theories abound as to how and when it occurred.

What is the difference between right and left? A small question with a big answer that touches upon symmetry, group theory, higher dimensions, the Cosmos and life itself.


Oct 22, 2014

Is it reasonable to expect an immediate (within 5 minutes) reply to my text message from a spouse at work in a tech job?

Lots of good answers about healthy boundaries. To expect an instant response is being way too clingy, even if he were out bowling with his friends, much less at work.

There is also a technical factor to consider : While SMS messages are usually delivered instantly, they are sometimes delayed by minutes, hours, sometimes a day.

No telling how many people have gotten into arguments simply because they don't realize this ...


Oct 23, 2014

Is there any particular reason why the phrase "Cats have 9 lives" uses the number 9? Why not 7 or 6? How did this number get incorporated into this phrase?

The origin of the myth appears lost to antiquity, and may have originated before writing was invented. (Making it impossible to track down).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0408_040408_oldestpetcat.html

So we have to guess. The myth that cats have multiple lives probably started as a euphemism for their lightening reflexes and skittish nature. Many a cat has cheated death by darting out of harms way in a furry blur.

As for the number 9 - that's not universal. In Italy, Germany, and Greece cats are said to have 7 lives. In Turkey and many Arabic countries the number is 6.


Oct 24, 2014

Is the FDA, or any objective chemical compound testing facility, studying the long-term, or short-term physiologic effects of inhaling vapor that contains propelyne glycol, as is being used in nicotine liquid/oil vaporizers?

Yes. Propylene Glycol is used in Asthma inhalers and in food, so underwent study prior to the e-cigarette being invented. The FDA redeclared it safe in this paper, dated 2004 :

Page on epa.gov

tldr :


"Upon reviewing the available toxicity information, the Agency has concluded that there are no endpoints of concern for oral, dermal, or inhalation exposure to propylene glycol and dipropylene glycol. This conclusion is based on the results of toxicity testing of propylene
glycol and dipropylene glycol in which dose levels near or above testing limits (as established in the OPPTS 870 series harmonized test guidelines) were employed in experimental animal studies and no significant toxicity observed.

A review of the available data has shown propylene glycol and dipropylene glycol to be negative for carcinogenicity in studies conducted up to the testing limit doses established by the Agency; therefore, no further carcinogenic analysis is required." -- US EPA

To be fair, it's not clear whether e-cigs deliver propylene glycol within the dosage ranges in that study, or if heating it (as an e-cig does) makes a difference. Also, there are some rare cases of people who are allergic to PG.

All in all, however, the stuff looks inn0cuous.


Oct 24, 2014

How could I fulfill the shared libraries requirement of GLIBC_2.15 by a program, given the admin somehow can't update the GLIBC_2.12?

Download/build glib_2.15 to your home account.

Change your path so that your local copy comes first.

Depending on what you're doing, you may need to only change the path for the shell your are using (e.g., your .bashrc file), or you may need to change -L (link) and -I (include) directives in your Makefile.

Google is your friend for all of this.


Oct 25, 2014

Where can I find a good developer to join my early stage startup?

There's 5 of you already and nobody can code ?

Give up now.


Oct 26, 2014

What are some cultural faux pas among smokers?

If you're in a group and the only light you have is a single pack of matches : never light a third cigarette off a single match. It's supposed to be bad luck; legend has it that this goes back to WW II where keeping a match lit for too long gives a sniper time to take aim.

If a guy asks for a light, hand him your lighter. If a woman asks, it's permissible to light it for her. Lighting a guy's cigarette for him is considered treating him like a female.

If you bum a cigarette and notice it happens to be the person's last one, refuse to take it.

If you bum a cigarette and the person extends the pack for you to take one, one of then might be upside down. This is the "wish cigarette", superstition has it the smoker can make a wish on it. Don't take that one.

When bumming a cigarette, it isn't customary but is polite to offer the person a buck. Usually they don't take it but appreciate the gesture.

In Puerto Rico, a man must NEVER ask a woman for a cigarette. It's seen as a sign of disrespect (and poverty).


Oct 28, 2014

Is a manager's job is to "protect the brilliant people from the people they drive crazy"?

No, Malcolm Gladwell is wrong on this, as he is on so many things. See Why do some people dislike Malcolm Gladwell's work? I live near MIT and Harvard, and it is easy to see that most brilliant people are quite likable. They help each other, defend worthy causes, and so on. There is no evident correlation between brilliance and (un)likeability.

Notice that Gladwell said he has "lost his fear of being corrected" so that he can grow as a writer. That's like saying "I became a better driver when I lost my fear of colliding with a tree"


Oct 28, 2014

How can you hide the smoke smell if your parents don't know you're smoking?

As Miles Dolphin hinted - you can't. Your parents already know. The smell clings to your hair, your hands, your breath, your clothes.


Oct 30, 2014

What percentage of climate scientists believe that the earth's climate is warming significantly as a result of the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels?

According to the American Meteorological Society, the number is hard to pin down but no clear consensus exists either way :

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/11/20/the-latest-meteorologist-survey-destroys-the-global-warming-climate-consensus/


Nov 2, 2014

Are there any Native Americans on Quora?


Nov 3, 2014

How do I overcome this very specific procrastination problem?

Most ideas get rejected. Not because they are bad, it's just human nature.

Ross Perot turned down buying Microsoft for 20 million. The founders tried to sell Google for 1 million and couldn't.

Go pitch your idea and get turned down. Then get a new idea, or a new twist on that idea, or hone a skill to develop a prototype of something yourself.

Don't constrain your life to a single idea.

Oh - and if they say yes - congratulations! Run with it and then ... get another idea anyway.


Nov 4, 2014

I have an idea for a social network that I believe will become the next Facebook. What must I do to get funding so that I can work full-time, buy dedicated server, etc.?

Get a better idea.


Nov 4, 2014

What are the signs of an ultra-smart person playing dumb?

Silence.

Michael Corleone (Character) from The Godfather (1972)

Stealth intellect has a slack expression, does not react, does not laugh, does not challenge, does not question.

It sits quietly, like a coiled snake, soaking up everyone and everything, until it makes a sudden move at the time of its choosing. You don't want to be in the path of that strike.


Nov 5, 2014

Hygiene: The woman who sits in the adjoining cubicle smells really bad. I mean really, really bad. I have to get up and walk around a bit when she comes to office. What are my options? Do I tell her? Leave an anonymous note? Do not give any joke answers please.

Are you American and is she not?

We Americans habitually shower every day, leaving no trace of our natural odor.

Most countries don't do this.

If this is the case, you can approach her with the issue framed as a cultural difference. "We Americans are fanatic bathers, which means we can smell people who aren't and it bothers us. We're ... A little nuts that way. But when in Rome ..."


Nov 5, 2014

How should I win back a friend who caught me having sex with his wife?

You can't.

Some day he may forgive you.

But the friendship is gone forever, murdered by betrayal.

The only decent option left is to leave him alone.


Nov 6, 2014

Do guys like girls who can cook? My boyfriend sometimes says that he wishes I could cook, but because I hate cooking, he says it's not a problem. Should I cook to make him happy?

Yes, guys like girls that can cook, especially somewhat older guys like me who were never taught to cook (in fact we got tossed out of the kitchen.)

You should not learn to cook just to please your boyfriend - unless you really really want to. In which case it's a very sweet thing to do.

You might consider a cooking class together, or teaching him after you learn. Cooking's a great skill for anyone to have, and the notion that only women should do it was abandoned decades ago.


Nov 6, 2014

Is it appropriate for a married man to be friends with a married woman and talk and text continuously even when he knows his wife is not approving that relationship?

I see an unsettling gender bias between most of the answers here, as compared to this other question : My boyfriend of 2 years doesn't like me talking to guys, controls me and is extremely jealous. He frequently asks me to send screenshots of my chat list on WhatsApp and becomes furious if he sees chats with a guy. What should I do?

Essentially, they are the same question with the gender roles swapped. In question 2, the woman is warned that the guy is exhibiting controlling and fearful behavior which is often a precursor to mental and physical abuse.

In question 1 - where the man is doing the talking - the answers are mixed : "It makes her unhappy, so ..." "Why are you so close to this friend anyway?" etc.

It is true that in question 2 the guy is more intrusively controlling and jealous.

But I think a few simple, unassailable, indisputable truths emerge :

Trust is a necessary condition for love.

Love does not ever try to control.

Friends come in both genders.

To answer your question: Not only is it OK for your husband to talk to his female friend; it is not subject to your approval.


Nov 7, 2014

My employer wants a blood sample to determine my health insurance premium. What should I do?

Many insurance companies require blood tests and other diagnostics (as well as disclosure of pre-existing conditions.)

You're better off just going through with it. In the US, a group plan will bury the cost of any existing or future condition so that your coverage/premiums won't change if you should run into $100,000 of medical expenses.

Individual plans don't provide that sort of security.

(Wasn't Obama supposed to fix all this ?!)


Nov 8, 2014

I am a 25-year-old engineer and only know C/C++. What other languages and things do I need to learn to survive in the software industry?

C/C++ is an excellent starting point. Other languages seem easy in comparison, and Java/JavaScript are very similar to C++.

At this stage, I would advise you to learn development for the web and for mobile.

I would learn JavaScript, JQuery, JQueryMobile and HTML5, This will enable you to build web apps, which are both web pages and cross platform mobile apps (both iPhone and Android.)
JavaScript isn't the toy language it once was: it is a rich tool for building web and mobile. JQuery takes a great deal of tedium out of it.

Becoming proficient in HTML5/CSS takes some practice, these languages have evolved to become large and nuanced.

Also learn how JSON is used to transport data in JavaScript. I would advise avoiding databases like MySQL for the moment, and instead use a Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) like parse.com to manage your data.

If you haven't already, I would also recommend getting comfortable with Unix. Most Web Servers run unix, and you can get Linux for free (I like Ubuntu).

Finally, I would pick up a templating utility like handlebars.js .


Nov 8, 2014

What types of e-cigs/vaporizers make the most vapor?

This one is very high quality and delivers a big cloud of vapor :

kanger EMOW


The key to lots of vapor is a) low atomizer resistance and b) higher voltage.

This increases the total power to the coil, hence more heat, hence more vapor. This comes with 1.5 Ohm dual coils (which is a low resistance) and adjustable voltage. It also has high airflow which makes for bigger clouds.


Nov 8, 2014

How can I put a counter on my website that calculates how much time they are saving by using my suggestions? I would provide the time saving amount for each suggestion taken, and I would like to tally that across all the users of my website.

Look into Google Universal Analytics.

About Universal Analytics

With just a bit of Javascript, you can collect any info you care about (userID, time saved, etc.) and then do all sorts of reports in different dimensions. You can even watch stuff evolve in real time.


Nov 8, 2014

What is a good test assignment to determine if a developer has the skills to build your app?

S/he refuses to do any assignment and insists on just building your app.


Nov 9, 2014

How do I speed up my laptop without downloading anything?

You have not provided enough information to give an answer, especially for someone who wants an answer ASAP.

Windows, Mac, or what ?


Nov 13, 2014

Is it possible to create a program, that does things it wasn't explicitly programmed to do?

Yes. While a program will only execute the instructions given to it - we cannot always be certain of the outcome.

Put differently - a set of instructions is not always predictable. In 1936 Alan Turing proved the impossibility of knowing, in general, if any given program is going to stop or just keep going forever. This question was known as the Halting problem; Turing showed the problem was formally undecidable.

Surprisingly : Each step a computer takes is entirely predictable. The long-term outcome of those steps is not (always).


Nov 14, 2014

As a technical person, what is your reaction when you hear the phrase "It's not what you know, it's who you know"? Does it make you rethink your personal development path and alter your plans on topics you wish to study or specialize in?

"You better know someone who thinks otherwise."


Nov 14, 2014

What can any company learn from Microsoft and Nokia?

Sometimes you're just too late.


Nov 15, 2014

What's wrong with my JavaScript Code?

To give a meta-solution to Cy Rossignol's excellent answer, you need a JavaScript debugger. I would learn how to put some javascript into a web page, load it into a browser (I like Chrome), and open up the debugger (Triple-bar/Tools/Developer Tools/Sources.)

You can't be productive in any language unless you can step through it, set break points and peek at values of variables.


Nov 15, 2014

What are the steps to starting your own candle company?

I've noticed two things about candle shops :

Women do most of the buying. All of the buying. Your target audience is female.

They smell candle after candle. Scent is a critical deal-breaker.


Based on this, I would drop your idea of making the scent a secret - instead, send out free samples of a tiny smears of candle-wax for customers to smell. Then let them choose from a broad set of styles - made in their favorite scent.

That just might be the differentiator that makes your candle site stand out.


Nov 15, 2014

Why is 360°, 360°?

It's about factorization.

If I just baked a pie, and the pie tin is marked off by 360 degrees, it's easy to cut the pie into equal sections between 2 people (180), or 3 people (120).

In fact, 360 divides evenly by 2,3,4,5,6,8,9 and 10.

We only get into a pie fight if 7 people show up. (Lucky/unlucky 7).

This also explains the common use of 60. 60 divides evenly by
2,3,4,5,6 and 10 .

Finally, similar reasoning applies to a dozen. 12 divides evenly by
2,3,4, and 6.

Note that 60 = 12 x 5 and that 360 = 60 x 6.


Nov 16, 2014

Should I give up programming if I have been learning for several months, and when faced with a new Ruby problem on Codewars or Codequizzes, my brain inevitably shuts down? I have to look at the solution in order to move forward.

I agree with Scott Berry, and would suggest you come at this completely differently.

Don't memorize solutions. Rather, learn to program and memorize only the language syntax.

You will learn more from writing bad code - that doesn't even *work* - than by memorizing good code. From here on out, all your solutions are completely your doing.

To take the example you give (search for the occurrence of all possible letters in a string), the given solution is very compact and elegant, but not instructive at all. It is using build-in language features to the max; hiding what is actually going on.

So take your own stab. Write some bad code. Loop through the string, one character at a time. Just look for the presence of an 'a'. Now look for an uppercase 'A' or lower case 'a'. Print 'found it!' if it's there.

Ok - now for some more crappy code. Look for the occurrence of all the letters and compose a string of 26 1/0's. Are you about to write 26 'if' statements? Stop - there's a better way. Think about it. Keep thinking about it, even if it takes days (how would you handle an alphabet with 20,000 different letters?)

Keep at it. You'll get it.

Then write your code which gives the desired result. Pat yourself on the back. Turns out you are "smart enough" after all.

Now compare your code to the one provided. You have 50 lines and they have one. They used some magic language features. What are they?

What's |letter| ? What's map? Look up these things up and consider where they could have helped in your solution.

In this way you're learning to program first, learning the nuance of the language second, and finally using both to write good code.


Nov 16, 2014

What is the meaning of your name? Does it have a story behind it? Why did your parents name you that? What do you like about it? Do you share it with a celebrity?

Christopher is a Christian name meaning "bearer of Christ." Saint Christopher is supposed to be the patron saint of travelers.


Nov 17, 2014

What is your review of Interstellar (2014 movie)?

★★★

This is the most conflicted of all my reviews.

In short, Interstellar is the worst movie that you must go see.

The good : Stunning scenes of other worlds. It's a visually gorgeous film. It is also supremely well-acted by a cast of supremely good actors, including the talented-way-beyond-her-years Mackenzie Foy. She's really fourteen but can easily imitate ten. She can cry on-demand, quivering lip and all. She has great range and nuance. I predict A Star Is Born.


The film-makers also get extra credit for making a beautiful film with minimal CGI.

Some peeks :




OK, stop now if you don't want any plot spoilers.

The bad : The story is so-so. Earth is dying due to an unknown cause - though biological war is hinted at (their crops keep dying off due to a 'blight') as is nuclear war and/or climate change. Whatever. Civilization is mostly toast.

Suddenly there's a wormhole near Saturn leading humanity to fresh planets. Which happen to be orbiting a black hole. Worm ... black ... whatever, all sorts of holes are out there.

Humanity is trying to get there and explore those worlds in the hopes of colonizing them.

This is where the story and screen-play go from so-so to god-damned awful. In order to get a thousand or so people to Jupiter, a scientist tries to "solve gravity." So they can all levitate one assumes.

Gravity's other supernatural ability is that it can transmit weak messages back through time. As in a ghost story, if the future-person pushes with all their might, they might dislodge a paper clip. So communication is tricky but possible.

It's like the babbling of a really stoned teenager, "So - dude! What if, like, gravity could cross all different dimensions or whatever, and you could go back in time and bang out messages to the past !? Like in morse code or something!?"

The screenplay goes from cringe-worthy to puke-worthy when Anne Hathaway has to mouth something like "What if love transcends time and space, and we should follow our heart!?".

A little bit of stupid science has to be tolerated, but this film really goes out of its way. That's Beef #1.

Beef #2 : When they tell you something, they tell you over and over to make sure you get it. Just in case you're as stoned as the guy who wrote the script. Yes, the father went back in time to be the 'ghost' in his daughter's room. We see that. Twice. He says it. His daughter says it. We get it.

Beef #3 : Despite the adamant re-explaining of plot points - some things are strangely left out. I'm OK with not knowing what wiped out Earth. The Road doesn't say either. But can we see something - anything - of the result? I paid 8 bucks, can I get one ghost-city at least? OK, it was 7 bucks. But still.

Alas - we don't catch a glimpse of this ruined world.

Beef #4 is you can do homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lots of movies do. But you can't steal whole scenes and movie plot points.

A magnetic beacon to an important message : check.

That messaging pointing toward Jupiter/Saturn, where a gateway to another world awaits : check.

Spinning space station to simulate gravity : check.

Spinning station approached by a shuttle, which itself has to match the spin in order to dock : check.

White suspended-animation "coffins" with tiny face-windows : check.


I could go on (and on) but you get the point. If Kubrick were alive, his reaction would be somewhere between insult and lawsuit.

But leave your brain at the popcorn machine, and come for the beautiful scenery and great actors.


Nov 22, 2014

If a husband cheats on his wife, and the wife dies without ever knowing it, would that still be morally wrong?

"Should the husband feel guilty knowing that he kept his wife happy till the end?"

Yes. The husband is engaged in self-serving rationalizations. The husband betrayed the one dearest to him. This contemptible act will always be a part of their life, and will always tarnish the history of choices during their time in life.

Don't bullshit yourself that it was to your wife's benefit, or that it's so long ago it doesn't matter.

"Go, and sin no more."


Nov 22, 2014

C (programming language): What are ways to work a code in order to generate a random number that doesn't repeat?

Your code looks awfully strange to me.

Anyway, you can do this :

(n ^ x mod p)

Where n is the range you want and p is any prime number greater than n.

For efficiency you can do repeated multiplication rather than exponentiation.

You can find a prime greater than N by asking http://m.wolframalpha.com/ .

This algorithm makes use of Euler's little theorem (and Ring Theory) to ensure n distinct results.

Edit : See the comment thread with Scott Berry if your ultimate goal is to shuffle a deck of playing cards.


Nov 22, 2014

I have an idea which could be very useful for iPhone security. I want to share my idea with Apple, as well as patent the idea. Will Apple be interested and encourage such thing?

You can protect your idea by filing a Provisional Patent Application. This costs 200 dollars and doesn't require approval from The patent office. You have one year to convert it into a full fledged patent application.

Be warned that patents for 'processes' have become more difficult to get. And they take about 3 years to get.

And Apple has a history of saying "fuck your patent" and burying you in legal costs in a legal battle.

Also, Apple suffers from NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) and probably won't even listen to, much less consider your idea.

But give it a shot, all u got to lose is 200 bucks.


Nov 23, 2014

When I see an elegant mathematical proof I feel that they are evident and that I could've easily come up with them without reading them or without any help. Can anyone prove my arrogance wrong?

If you can do the proof yourself, you're not arrogant, just good at math. There is a slim chance you are extraordinarily good - but that's only if you prove 'open problems' for which no proof is yet known. So you're not arrogant, just good - and not so good that you should imagine yourself some kind of genius. But good enough that you should consider a more challenging course of study.

If you can't solve them you're worse than arrogant, you're deluded (the phrase 'full of crap' seemed harsh.)

So find out which. Read the theorem but not the proof - prove it yourself. If successful - look for harder theorems to prove. When you hit the wall at something like 'Theorem : There exists infinitely many polynomials of degree five which are not solvable in a closed algebraic expression.' - get an outline of the existing proof and try to fill in the gaps yourself.

And if you need a quick humbling, try to prove the Riemann conjecture.


Nov 23, 2014

I want to learn how to control people. Where do I start?

Over.


Nov 23, 2014

How are Emacs users and communists alike?

They both cling to an archaic 'solution' which is more complex and and painful than the problem they were intended to solve.


Nov 25, 2014

How can I politely break the news to my girlfriend that she is getting fat and developing a bra bulge?

From a safe distance, with air cover if possible.


Nov 26, 2014

How is Mark Zuckerberg able to lead and manage a company as a CEO without having an MBA degree?

Oh.

This is awkward.

MBA's don't actually learn anything useful.

Sorry you had to find out this way.


Nov 26, 2014

If you don't show up to court to contest your spouse's getting a restraining order, does it send a message that you don't care much about the marriage?

Send a message you don't care about the marriage?

News flash : That horse left the barn already. Your wife is about to file for divorce.

I would advise you not contest the restraining order and get divorced as quickly and painlessly as possible.

You have my sympathies and hopes for a better relationship with somebody else.


Nov 27, 2014

What is the best approach to become more proficient at C++?

With another language! For the love of God - another language!

C++ is dense, cryptic, idiosyncratic and straight up weird. (And before you flame me, I worked in C++ for 12 years and have written code for WebKit, so there.)

An interpreted language is much easier to learn on. Instant response to changes.

Python's also a good one. So is Ruby.


Nov 28, 2014

I am a machine and I will turn off someday. Unfortunately I know this. How to keep going on? Just enjoy life and keep looking at new discoveries, new cool histories and all that new stuff each day?

If you are a machine, who is the one that wants to know?


Nov 29, 2014

I want to end my life. What should keep me from doing it?

Send me a private message.

I will not divulge your identify to anyone.


Dec 1, 2014

What is your reaction to this: GOP Staffer Apologizes For Lecturing Obama Daughters To "Show A Little Class"?

I'm honestly puzzled that the GOP staffer didn't understand that the kids of the president are off-limits in political discourse and that her "letter" to them was instant career suicide. (She has since 'resigned' which is DC-speak for fired.). They're off-limits even in the lowliest gossip-rags.

It's really odd she didn't know that, being a "senior staffer". Did the topic just never come up (she is rather young)? Did she forget? Was she drunk? Not too bright?

Seriously - how did she not know?


Dec 1, 2014

In one line, what is the difference between success and satisfaction?

Success is a fleeting fulfillment of desire; satisfaction is the lasting lack of desire.


Dec 2, 2014

If we found matter travelling faster than light, what would be the impact on Einstein's mass-energy relation?

None - relativity (special and general) allow for tachyons which go faster than light, and backward in time (from our point of view.)

The trick is they are born that way; approaching and reaching the speed of light takes infinite energy for non-zero mass; if you're born faster than light, Einstein is cool with that.

We would break causality though, wreaking havoc on our understanding of the universe ...


Dec 2, 2014

What are some terms heard only in programming?

Oh man, this could take seconds !!!


Dec 2, 2014

What are the best ways to maximize my idea for a startup?

Ditch it.

I'm serious, and quoting from Paul Graham .

From How to Get Startup Ideas,

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.


That is, learn to build stuff and find unsolved problems.


Dec 3, 2014

Why don't Americans eat seaweed?

It's just cultural inertia. I was born and raised on the coast in the North East USA, and seaweed was always looked upon as this weird crap that washed up on the beach.

Not until my forties was I offered seaweed and found that I liked it.


Dec 3, 2014

How bad is it to get nicotine in your mouth?

Happens occasionally to me.

No ill effects I've noticed. Just spit it out.

Note that both nicotine gum and lozenges deliver nicotine orally.

(That's just a drop. Nobody should ever drink the stuff; you can get a fatal dose of nicotine.)


Dec 3, 2014

What single sentence, the second you hear it, makes you absolutely livid?

"It's right in front of you!"

(I have some trouble scanning for objects in my field of view due to a strange brain. I heard that expression alot as I was growing up before I or anyone else understood the issue was neurological and unavoidable.)


Dec 7, 2014

Why don't electrons get completely repelled from each other when they come close?

The short answer is they do; the long answer is that an electron doesn't have a position and velocity in the classical sense; rather it exists as a probability wave around the nucleus :


Physicist speak of the electron "cloud", rather than the electron particle.
So the sense in which electrons "repel" each other becomes a much larger question of how these waves act when superimposed, leading to the Pauli Exclusion Principle where no two electrons can have the same "quantum state", in some sense "pushing" each other away. Interestingly this principle applies to a larger class of particles (fermions.)

In just a few steps, the pursuit of this question leads you into the exotic and puzzling domain of quantum mechanics.


Dec 7, 2014

Why did Einstein feel that gravity was more than just a curvature of time and so develop general relativity based on both time and space curvature?

To add to Todd Gardiner's answer, let's step through this.

In 1905, Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity. They key feature of this theory is that no self-contained experiment can detect motion. That is, you can conduct any experiment in a room but you can't peek out of the window and reference some external object, and we're not talking about acceleration - just smooth motion. Classical mechanics said you could easily detect your motion through the 'aether'. Einstein said that you couldn't. Specifically, Einstein said the speed of light will be measured to be the same no matter how fast the room is moving. You could be in my living room or in another moving 99% the speed of light away from me. We will both measure c to be the same.

So c stays fixed - everything else has to change. You (who are moving at 99% c away from me) have a greater mass. Your clock is moving slower.
Your have become flatter in the direction of your motion. But you can't detect these changes because they all are uniform within the room.

So the speed of light is fixed, but mass, time and spacial dimensions change to compensate. The notion of simultaneity becomes subjective.

Einstein threw away all of our most familiar intuitions, completely discarding Newtonian mechanics - all for the sake of preserving the speed of light. The genius of this is more psychological than intellectual : any other person who happened upon this idea would scoff and say, "Well - I'm not going to defy every bit of human experience with both ruler and clocks just to make this weird light experiment do what I want."

But Einstein did. Without a scrap of evidence. It was foolish, bizarre and bordering on insane to blow up the foundations of physics just for some exotic experiment with light nobody cared about.

Somehow Einstein intuited that Relativity was real and our perceptions were an illusion. That distances weren't fixed, that clocks didn't keep time with each other, that energy isn't conserved but that mass-energy is. To make these assertions is madness. To be right is genius without peer or precedent.

Einstein gives formulae for the change in spacial dilation (flatterning), time dilation (slowing clock), and the change in mass - culminating in
E=mc2

Three years later, in 1908, Minkowski comes along. He is expanding on work by Henry Poincare that considers a 4-dimensional time-space; the three spacial dimensions have real coordinates and the 4th dimension of time has an imaginary coordinate.

Minkowski develops Maxwell's field equations in this space. He also shows that Einstein's Special Relativity formulae emerge from it. Minkowski has found a mathematical model of the universe which explains why clocks and rulers start acting weird so that the speed of light is always the same (if you're not accelerating.) More formally, that the Maxwell Field Equations are invariant under a Lorentz Transformation.

So time and space have been wed together before gravity even enters the picture. In 1908, Minkowski announces,

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. – Hermann Minkowski, 1908

A little melodramatic but Minkowski has earned it. "Minkowski space" is the most straight-forward way to deal with Special Relativity.

Einstein adopts Minkowski space-time, and spends ten years trying to find how gravity fits in.

Put very crudely, Einstein proposes that mass bends time-space. More specifically, he gives the equations for a modification of Minkowski time-space which, rather than being uniform, bends in the presence of mass. Einstein uses tensors to precisely define the bending.

Here's what the Einstein Field Equation looks like :
Rμν12gμνR+gμνΛ=8πGc4Tμν

This model of time-space gives us gravity.

To get back to your question - why didn't "Time curve" and not space?
a) Time alone "curving" doesn't mean anything, mathematically. When we speak of time-space and "bending" this is descriptive short-hand for Manifolds, Tensors and other mathematical notions.
b) Time-space got married before gravity was tackled.
c) Even in non-gravitational Special Relativity, we have spacial dilation as well as time dilation (things get flatter in the direction of motion.) So space is doing weird things already. A theory which deals only in the time dimension can't account for this.
d) Finally, let's sweep all this away and look at your question fresh : Suppose gravity is just a result of time 'bending' - some sort of time dilation.
So a falling object is speeding up because ... it's clock is changing which increases its velocity? Suppose we buy that principle.

Now suppose we are flying past the Sun in a spaceship. We aren't suicidal so we aren't flying into the Sun, just past it. The Sun's gravity deflects our course by 45 degrees left.

How can any theory which asserts that only time is perturbed account for the fact that we didn't just speed up or slow down, but change direction in space ?

It can't.

No experiment has ever countermanded the Einstein Field Equation in which time-space bends in the presence of mass.


Dec 9, 2014

Why should I live after flunking the JEE on my second attempt?

I live in the USA and have no idea what a JEE is. But I do know this :

Happiness and success are not to be found in racing others up the same mountain.

They lie in finding your own mountain.

Don't allow others to dictate what you can do and how well you can do it.

Rather, decide for yourself and show them.


Dec 9, 2014

Why do people feel the need to give me glares and go out of their way to forcefully cough in my face?

I've never seen this before. May I ask your ethnicity?

The only thing I can think is that you smell strange to them, maybe too much cologne or something.

Or perhaps you have the misfortune to bear a resemblance to a hated person in your town?

Because otherwise I've never seen such consistent and specific hostility (coughing) toward anyone, of any ethnicity, anywhere.

Finally, could there be some selection bias on your part? Are you unusually fearful of germs or coughing? You may be perceiving this targeting of you only because your memory is emphasizing these particular encounters and forgetting the thousand non coughers you encounter each day.


Dec 10, 2014

What is your review of Want Answers (discontinued Quora feature)?

I think it is a great idea that we can attach value to a question; however it is vastly simpler and more consistent to simply allow people to UPVOTE/DOWNVOTE QUESTIONS.

Independently, we can choose to unfollow a question in our feed. It is not at all uncommon to think a question is important, to desire answers, but not want our feed cluttered with it.


Dec 10, 2014

I recently quit smoking and now I'm having trouble getting out of bed. I need some sort of stimulant which is every bit as easy to take upon waking up. Do you have any suggestions?

Fruit! You'll get a quick blast of fructose energy.

Experiment with melons, oranges, mango, etc ...

Also, just give it time. Your body is going to need months to readapt to zero nicotine.

Congratulations, btw. Quitting smoking doesn't just extend your life, but bestows greater health throughout that long life.

PS : I also like Michael J. McFadden's chocolate answer. You could combine our answers into ... Chocolate covered strawberries!


Dec 10, 2014

Quitting Smoking: Are nicotine replacement therapies addictive? If not, why not?

Addiction involves both physical and psychological dependence.

(If cigarette addiction were only physical, just locking someone away for a week or two would cure them.)

What nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) does is let you tackle the psychological addiction separately (and first.). The urge to light up after a meal, a movie - whatever your "triggers" are. You can focus on unlearning this behavior without going through physical withdrawal.

Then you can reduce the nicotine in a controlled way. You can drop by, say, 20% now that you've had practice combating the psychological urge.

A drop this small is barely perceptible.

And so on, until your nicotine is zero and you are free!


Dec 11, 2014

Why do we see a red color when we hold our palm against a light source?

Blood.


Dec 12, 2014

How hard can it be to quit smoking without using a patch?

I disagree with the answers that mention "will-power". Beating addiction is not about moral fortitude.

It is about insight, knowledge, support and perseverance if you slip.

Quitting cold turkey is harder because the withdrawal symptoms come at you full force just when you're also trying to make changes in your behavior patterns (time for a smoke break!)

It also depends how hooked you are. Do you smoke in the morning? Then you're pretty hooked. Ever skip a day for no reason? Then you're not hooked.

If you're hooked, cold turkey is the toughest way but worth a try. It's not like you're going to get sick like an alcoholic or heroine addict.

Try to join a support group (they are everywhere). Get light exercise but go easy on yourself that week. (Choosing a week where you don't work is helpful.). Google Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and use it to combat urges to smoke. This helps you uncover the thought patterns that lead to 'relapse' (resumption of smoking). Keep a journal of when urges appear and how you combatted them.

Don't slip and have "just one". But if you do, don't dwell on it, throw the rest out and get right back to quitting.

Millions of people quit cold turkey. Millions of others fail that way, and end up with a nicotine replacement like the patch or gum, asking a doctor for a medication like Chantix, or even using an e-cig (a tactic of last resort IMO.)

How hard is it? It depends on your unique dependence on nicotine.

I suggest you try it and find out. If it proves too difficult you can then look into nicotine replacement therapy or medication.

I smoked for 35 years. Self discipline is not my strong point. But I quit.

So can you. The sooner the better.


Dec 12, 2014

If Jesus never lived, how do you explain the stories about him? This is a question for those who don't believe that Jesus ever lived.

Zeus never lived. QED.

On another note, even many atheists agree that a man named Jesus (Yeshua) existed around 30 AD, claimed to be of divine origin and was crucified by the Romans.

The Romans were big on writing stuff down.


Dec 14, 2014

What are some things I could start doing right now (I'm 14) that will help me in 5-8 years?

Let go.

Life will take care of itself in 5-8 years.

Let it. Don't worry about. Sure, study and do your homework - develop a healthy self-discipline like many (most?) kids do.

Beyond that, being fourteen is wonderful in a way you'll only fully realize later in life. Go out and see and do and feel.

Get a crush on someone. Feel everything. Get outside. Tear into anything that interests you, make a best friend. Roam. Discover.

When I was 14, I'd ride my bike to a cow pasture. I would pick up fresh grass from beyond their fences, and they would wander over so I could hand feed them.

I'm 48. I'm a pretty good coder and was good at math. I've got code running in the Chromium and Safari browsers, and ranked 250 on the Putnam Exam (google it).

I can't recall exactly what that code in Chromium does, or what problems I solved on the Putnam.

But I remember indelibly the smell of fresh grass, the glint of sunlight off my ten speed and the excited cows, happy to see me back again.

Go live.


Dec 14, 2014

How do I Minimize Tension?

"Everyone should meditate for 20 minutes each day. Unless you're too busy for that.

In which case you should meditate for an hour." -- Unknown


Dec 14, 2014

Why won't my ex boyfriend answer my one question of why he made a mockery of our 4 year relationship?

He won't answer your question because he doesn't want contact with you.

Your behavior, by your own account, is frightening. It may even be construed as illegal. Almost anyone would wish to avoid you as a result.

You are engaged in a power-play. You have a demand, not a request. You have taken hostages (his social media, etc.)

His response is naturally to fear and distrust you. Who can he know you'll stop even if he answers your question.

You're banking on the fact that you can get what you want by being more ruthless, more nasty, and more persistent than anyone else.

You can't. You are harassing another person needlessly, and putting yourself at risk legally and even physically. Yes, physically - people can be unpredictable when hounded and bullied for months.

You don't get others to do what you want. You cannot control them. You are playing a dangerous game, and losing, by using these tactics.

The only person you can control is you. You can return to him his social media accounts. Cut off contact with his current love interest. Send him a brief note of apology and assurance that you will leave him alone.

And you walk away. Without your answer. But with new-found dignity and compassion.

That's a game worth winning.


Dec 15, 2014

What are the advantages of having a low GPA?

It frees up time to become educated.


Dec 16, 2014

What's the point of pretending that airplanes like shooting stars?

In an urban environment, you can't see stars (shooting or otherwise) because of ambient light. You can see the tail lights on planes, though.

You also never know when shooting stars will appear, while air traffic is continuous over a major city. So you don't have to wait.

"Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now ..."

The lyric is the lament of an urbanite with a desperate need.


Dec 16, 2014

What is the best electronic cigerette?

I tried lots of different kinds until I finally settled on one that gave off good vapor, didn't leak or otherwise malfunction.

It's the Kanger Pro Tank II.
http://www.quality-vapor.com/kanger-protank-2-starter-kit/

As for the juice (flavored nicotine solution),
that's very subject to taste. I suggest you
get samples of different types online.

I'd suggest American companies that use
food-grade propylene glycol and/or vegetable
glycerin. Revolutionvapors.com is one such
company.

Note : I have no financial interest in any e-cig
or e-cig supply company.


Dec 17, 2014

Is cosmic inflation simply a fix to make the Big Bang theory work? Two plus two equals four, but what if I need two plus two to equal five to concur with my actual observations of something far, far, away?

Um. Hmm. "This makes my theory the most elegant and precise theory every conceived!"

No. This isn't a theory. The assertion that 2+2=5 explains away the Big Bang ... Isn't wrong - it conveys no meaning whatever.

The claim 2+2=5 implies 1=0 which blows up mathematics entirely. Every number equals every other number. No number theory, arithmetic, algebra or calculus.

None of which has any bearing on the Big Bang - which is the simple observation that all galaxies are moving away from us at a speed we can measure.


Dec 17, 2014

Does water really rotate down the drain in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres, and if so, why does it do that?

The reason it *seems* that way is that few people actually check.

Before the Internet, you'd have to be a world traveller to know. So if you're just hanging out in a bar, and you make this reasonable-sounding claim - people had a choice between "cool, I didn't know that" and "bullshit. I'm hopping on a plane to Australia to prove it."

Of course, the former response was vastly more popular. People would believe and repeat it.

In the Internet age, anybody can quickly look up the fact that the Coreolis Effect is negligible in drains, so anybody making this claim can be accused of being a bit gullible, or at least incurious.


Dec 18, 2014

I am having trouble using nicotine vaporizers at high enough dosages for me. This is because anything more than 6mg makes me cough and hiccup. Would it help to use antitussives or local analgesics? If so, what can I add to my e-liquid (or administer separately) so that I can tolerate higher dosages of nicotine?

Your situation is quite a puzzle. So zero nicotine and you're fine? But you cough at low levels of nicotine?

I agree with Michael J. McFadden and David Rosen that you may be allergic to propylene glycol. My personal favorite VG-only juice is from Johnson Creek (I like Wisconsin Frost.)

Johnson Creek Smoke Juice

However, you claim the problem is nicotine-dependent, so switching to pure VG is worth a shot, but only as an experiment. It sounds it probably won't work.

Hiccups are a classic reaction to orally consuming nicotine. Are you letting the vapor collect on your tongue rather than directly inhaling it?

Are you sure you're addicted to nicotine ? Do you inhale the smoke daily? It sounds almost like your body is not habituated to nicotine at all.

There are other parameters to tweak tho. Are you taking really long draws? Take shorter ones. Do you have adjustable voltage? If not, get it and turn the voltage down. Are your coils at a high enough resistance (I recommend 2.4 Ohm or higher.)

Are you sourcing your juice from an American distributor?

Do you just need a day or two to get used to it?

If none of this fiddling helps, I would give up on e-cigs - you just have a rare aversion to them. Nicotine gum, lozenges and patches are still out there for you.


Dec 20, 2014

Why does the government grant licenses for cigarette manufacturing, knowing that it's extremely injurious to health?

History and politics.

Substances are banned only if the general population has no interest in them. (There is no crack-head lobby).

Most politicians are hanging from an electoral thread: the hardcore Dems and Reps vote along party lines. What decides elections are the 'swing votes' :libertarians, aisle-(jumpers), undecided and the apathetic. (The stakes go up in winner-take-all states, where we get an swing STATE).

So we're talking about 10 percent of the electorate, I'm guessing.

So. You run on a platform of banning cigarettes. No smoker will vote for you.

Can you make it up? I doubt very much that non-smokers would agree or swing votes for you.

Oh - and other candidates could scoop up those votes by condemning your view.

So. You wanna ban cigarettes? Or get elected?


Dec 21, 2014

How can an athletic guy nicely discriminate against smoking women because the guy does not want to marry a smoker?

On point one, from your question details - I seriously doubt your talk about addictions and endorphins is a huge chick-magnet.

Secondly - it's the easiest thing in the world because it's not personal. "I can't date a smoker."

That's it, that's all, drive through.

They are not insulted personally, now have even more incentive to quit, you told the truth and are off the hook.

When I was a smoker I heard that about 3 times.

Finally, are you seeking out women to talk about all this endorphine/addiction guff? Then you're paying a lot of attention to smoking women, some of whom are bound to think your interested.

BTW, on a purely personal note ; don't be an expert. Science doesn't even have addiction completely figured out yet.

Getting over an addiction, and proclaiming expertise in the subject is like finding your way out of the woods and claiming you're a forest ranger.


Dec 23, 2014

Was there a way forward for Yahoo?

Yahoo's worth lies in it's Ailibaba holdings, not any kind of web (ad) revenue.

Did the board just hire Marissa to keep the seat warm until Ailibaba went public?

Marissa was famous for A/B testing all UX solutions. This does not seem the mindset of an innovator. Steve Jobs would probably throw you out of his office for suggesting it. Calling you "reductionist buffoon with no intuition for beauty" or something even more caustic.

Yahoo was second place in everything. There was no standout product to help define what Yahoo IS.

And you don't A/B test your way out of that problem.

Was Marissa set up to fail ?


Dec 24, 2014

What is the actual premise and scenario of the scientist conspiracy?

All I have heard is that scientists have been perpetrating a lie of some some. Einstein was a front man for delivering these lies (with relation to physics and cosmology). And the theory of Evolution is part of this conspiracy/lie. But very little else.


Go somewhere else. You're getting information which is reckless and intellectually lazy. Unlike them, learn some science. You should be able to describe what proof exists of the general theory of relativity and of evolution.


Dec 24, 2014

What is the best profession?

A teacher, medical professional, firefighter, cop. In no particular order.

Let me tell you a tale. A tale of two funerals.

In the late '90s a certain relative of mine passed away. We were not close. He was extremely successful as an industrialist; had a mansion and yachts and a collection of Rolls Royce's.

His name is on a building, he left a wake of endowments behind him.

But he didn't have much contact with others. Couldn't resolve conflict. Was often belligerent and obnoxious.

20 people came to his funeral. 10 of us family and the rest on his payroll in one way or another.

OK, let me tell you about another funeral. My father was a philosophy teacher at Conn College for almost 40 years. He died suddenly between Christmas and New Year's, 1999.

Trips were cancelled. Flight plans redirected. 100's of people showed up for his funeral. Mostly former students. One simply shook my hand and said, "Your father inspired me to be a teacher."

That's legacy.

That's life.

That's why we came.


Dec 24, 2014

How far is string theory from being proven and what will it take?

If a physics-head like Jay Wacker can check me on this :

I believe the last missing piece needed to confirm the Standard Model is to verify Super Symmetry. This gives each particle a very, very massive partner s-partical (or spartical).

Since the mass-energies are so high, they are cranking the LHC way up to search for sparticles.


Dec 27, 2014

Do people change?

Through work, insight, reflection and maybe therapy -

Yes. Someday you may become someone who can be trusted with an unattended laptop.


Dec 29, 2014

What are the differences between Bars, Pubs, Clubs, Discos and Lounges?

A man goes to a pub to meet his buddies.

He goes to a club to meet girls.

He goes to a bar to get drunk.


Dec 29, 2014

When someone says 'this explanation was hand-wavy', what does that mean?


It is generally taken to mean you have left out a critical part. This could be from excessive brevity, because you don't know yourself, or because your whole argument is wrong.


Dec 29, 2014

How did we come about needing to explain light and gravity in the same framework?

Einstein deliberately set out to do this in his General Theory of Relativity. He wanted a single framework to account for electromagnetism (Maxwell's field equations), uniform motion (Special Relativity) and accelerated motion/gravity.

He published General Relativity in 1916. He made some predictions that star light observed during an eclipse would be altered by the sun's gravitational field, and predicted the discrepancy.

In 1919, the New York Times ran this story :


Dec 31, 2014

Are there biases from law makers and regulators against e-cigarettes prompting them to restrict them when there is not enough good data to support the narrative that they are equally toxic to conventional cigarettes?

I think so.

A simple analysis of the constituents of vapor versus cigarette smoke show that smoking is incomparably more dangerous; in serious doubt exists that vaping poses any health hazard greater than using nicotine gum.

The anti-smoking lobby, which brought huge lawsuits against Big Tobacco and succeeded in banning smoking in most public places - are in the awkward position of winning.

Cigarettes are banned from public places, Big Tobacco paid out large settlements (making some lawyers wealthy), and tobacco companies admit
that smoking is dangerous.

Along comes vaping, and the anti-smoking lobby jumps on it out of sheer boredom.

Strangely, Big Tobacco is now on their side as vaping cuts into their profits (Big Tobacco doesn't produce most e-cigs). So the former enemy is now happy to donate to their cause.

What's lost in all this is the well-being of smokers (oh - remember them!). Millions have stopped inhaling tar, carbon monoxide and the 69 known carcinogens in tobacco smoke. They switched to vaping.

It may just be the most effective Nicotine Replacement Therapy ever.

One would hope that this possibility be celebrated, the inventor given a Nobel Prize, that governments would move to subsidize and standardize this product to promote public health.

The public health. The original issue.


Dec 31, 2014

How should a lady tell a guy that his fly is open in public without embarrassing him?

To minimize embarassment, enlist the help of a guy. Ask him to discreetly whisper, "Fly's down, brah. Don't want your dick to get tagged in Facebook."


Jan 1, 2015

What are the best adult kick scooters in the US?

If you want to keep cost down, I recommend buying a Jonway 50cc Agility. They go for $800 new. Their quality has really improved in the last few years and parts are readily available.


After the breakin period of 300 miles, you can 'derestrict' the engine by disconnecting a single wire. Top speed then increases from 30 MPH to 44 MPH.

Warning : if you buy a Honda or Yamaha, make sure it is legally a moped (park anywhere, no insurance, etc.) and not a Limited Use Motorcycle. It varies by brand and state. Jonway is a moped everywhere, I believe.


Jan 3, 2015

In the context of air molecules and forces, why does the air above a wing moving through the atmosphere produce less force on the upper surface of that wing when compared to the force exerted by air on the surface below the wing?

You're looking for an intuitive explanation of Bernoulli's Principle :



I should point out as an aside that this principle does *not* get planes off the ground. That's a myth - the Bernoulli principle doesn't provide enough lift to raise the plane, other factors do. This is easily seen in a plane doing a roll or flying upside-down. If Bernoulli's principle were holding it up, the plane couldn't do this.

Anyway, the Bernoulli Principle does apply some lift, and the example of an airplane wing is as good as any. So imagine the air molecules as they hit the wing.

First of all, air molecules just skim along the bottom of the wing at the speed of the plane. The top of the wing, however is curved and thus longer than a straight line. The molecules are forced to *speed up* to take this longer path.

This increases the space between the molecules. Hence the air is less dense on top of the wing. The faster the motion of the plane, the greater the difference in density between top and bottom.

Less dense air has lower pressure. High pressure on the bottom pushes the wing upward towards the less dense air on top.

If you want a molecular, intuitive explanation for density affecting pressure : keep in mind that all the air molecules are already moving in random directions. When a surface is around, some of these molecules impact the surface and bounce off, creating a push we call pressure.

When the air is denser, there are more molecules to hit the surface, so pressure increases.

In the case of Bernoulli's principle, I'm papering over the subtlety that we have to add the speed of the plane to the already-randomly-moving air molecules, but I think you get the idea. (The net direction of motion of a large collection of molecules is zero in still air. In air with a velocity we get a consistent bias in the random motion favoring that velocity.)

You can easily see the principle at work for yourself using a sink. Get a small but steady stream of water going. Place your finger very close - but not touching - the stream.

The air being pulled along with the stream has to speed up to get around your finger. So the molecules briefly spread farther apart. Pressure drops, and water moves toward the low pressure. The stream bends toward your finger (and it gets wet).


Jan 3, 2015

My parents want to sit in on my therapy sessions. How do I explain that it's an issue of confidentiality?

Tldr : Let your therapist tell them.

Demanding to sit in on your therapy under threat of pulling you out is straight-up black mail (however well intended.)

I would ask your therapist to call them and explain this (or have them in for one session alone as another poster suggests.)

If they want *family therapy*, separate from and in addition to your private sessions, that might be a good option. Either with your current therapist or a separate one (that decision being yours with the advice of the therapist.)


Jan 3, 2015

What disease describes a condition where a lifetime of high cholesterol has caused blood vessels to become less elastic?


Jan 4, 2015

How safe and how effective is immunization? Is it so necessary to have our kids immunized? My son fell very ill with fever after some injection in his thigh. Should I perhaps wait until my son is 2 to continue them?

Short answer : The risk of the disease far outweighs the very remote risk of an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

And there is NO link to autism at all. The researcher who made this claim has been discredited and stripped of his medical license.


Jan 4, 2015

How do I tell a 20 year old woman that she has forgotten to shave her armpit hair?

You don't.

A woman not shaving her underarms, here in the USA, has become A Thing.

I know a couple twenty somethings that don't. Amanda Palmer, famous for forming and fronting The Dresden Dolls, never did :


Female under-arm hair is such A Thing that some even do this :


The Millenials are ...

Immune to your consultation. They're quite aware what they're goin' through.
(-- David Bowie, Changes)


Jan 4, 2015

How can I ask a girl on a date if I don't have a car?

"I'll pick you up at 7!" is strictly for the 1950's.

It's an expected part of "date safety" that you both agree to meet at a public place.

It's the woman's prerogative to extend the date to "your place or mine?" In which case you keep cab fare handy.

Solved.


Jan 4, 2015

What are the very best answers on Quora, as chosen by the Top Writers who wrote them?

Almost all of my favorites garnered relatively few upvotes, so I'm happy for a chance to highlight them here. In fact, I'll focus on the ones got little attention :

Christopher Reiss's answer to Which single event left the most indelible mark on the American psyche?


...
Unrecognizable to their elders in both appearance and beliefs, in a sense this was the first new and distinct American generation. They came to Woodstock to announce and celebrate themselves.
We've been naming each new generation ever since.
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "tell me, where are you going?"
This he told me :
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
got to get back to the land
And set my soul free.
....


Christopher Reiss's answer to What is the difference between left and right?

I blab about symmetry, mathematics, cosmology and even quantum mechanics ...


...

Finally resolving to :

What is the difference between right and left? A small question with a big answer that touches upon symmetry, group theory, higher dimensions, the Cosmos and life itself.

Only seven upvotes on this next one, but it's probably my all-time fav. A review of the latest Planet of the Apes movie, it tries to arch back over the years and place this film in cinematic history.

Christopher Reiss's answer to Is Rise of the Planet of the Apes worth seeing? Why or why not?


Jan 5, 2015

What are some common applications of algebraic topology in quantum field theory?

The Calabi-Yau manifold, emerging from algebraic geometry/topology, is a candidate for the shape of the extra, undetectable, curled-up dimensions in String Theory :


Jan 5, 2015

What are the pros and cons of electronic vaporizers?

Pros : It is easy for many smokers to make the switch, because it provides an experience almost identical to smoking, nicotine kick included. Unlike cigarette smoke, it contains no carbon-monoxide, 'tar', or the 69 known carcinogens in cigarette smoke. It doesn't smell bad or linger on your clothes. You can directly control the nicotine content, so you can wean off at your own rate. It's much cheaper than cigarettes.

Cons : There hasn't been long-term studies yet to assess the precise risk. It emulates smoking so well that you aren't working on breaking the psychological dependence on the act of smoking. Caveat emptor applies to the purchasing of the flavored nicotine 'juice.' Ideally it's made in the USA with food grade Propylene Glycol and/or Vegetable Glycerin, and monitored nicotine content. 'Juice' from China is regarded with suspicion.


For me, the pros outweigh the cons and I switched to vaping with almost no effort, despite being a very addicted smoker for many years.


Jan 5, 2015

Can nothing produce something?

Sure - it happens all the time. It's happening inside you, many billions of times per second. Or at least many physicists think so.

The theory of quantum foam postulates that a - even in a vacuum - particles and anti-particles pop out of nowhere. Then they annhihilate each other.



This theory is still being tested experimentally, but I think the majority of physicists are betting on its being true. Perhaps Jay Wacker can chime in on the current status of this notion among physicists.


Jan 5, 2015

Avatar (2009 movie): Why did Jake Sully and his brother pursue such different careers? Was Jake not smart?

Jake was a marine; his twin brother Tom was a doctor.

Since they were identical twins, Jake could drop right into Tom's avatar.

But Jake is very different than Tom, as their careers show.

The movie is pulling Jake out of the human race. He got his legs blown off in a (human) war. His new colleagues want his brother - the brilliant doctor - not this marine. They aren't accepting of him, and make no effort to conceal their contempt.

Jake doesn't fit in.

Aside from losing his legs, his brother Tom was killed over a stupid robbery of his wallet.

Jake's bond to humans - those around him and back on earth - is weakening. He may even feel contemptuous of humans.

He is motivated to leave the human world and join the Na'vi.


Jan 6, 2015

Scientists are always searching for water or oxygen on other planets. Why is it not possible that there might be aliens, for instance, who take in sulfuric acid as food?

Scientists are playing the odds.

Have a look at the ten most common elements in our galaxy :



Life on Earth is composed mainly of Hydrogen(#1), Oxygen(#3), Carbon(#4) and Nitrogen(#7).

That's more than half of the 7 most common elements. Since we know that life can arise from these elements, it makes probabilistic sense that it would emerge that way again.

You may wonder why we are called "Carbon-based" life forms : Why carbon and not the other 3 ? Because carbon makes chains and circles. Like a Lego piece, we can always add one and still have a slot for another. Arbitrarily complex molecules can form - like DNA.

Sure, there are other elements that form chains as well. Silicon does. So silicon-based life is possible. But if you look at the chart - carbon is 7 times more abundant than silicon.

In our search for life, the odds suggest it is chemically similar to us.


Jan 7, 2015

When I try to quit smoking between day 3 and 7 or so I get some kind of emotional breakdown/become sad/cry/a major down swing. Does this happen to others who try to quit? How do you deal with it? Do you just remind yourself it will pass/will power or do you take some kind of medication or?

Mood swings, depression, anger and difficulty sleeping and focussing are common effects of quitting an addiction to nicotine - a stimulant.

I don't have scientific sources - but from my own experiences and friends - these symptoms peak in the latter half of week one. Your day 3-7 would coincide with that.

As for me, I still injest nicotine through e-cigs. I don't suggest that for you since you seem able to get off nicotine for a week.

But I've quit in the past and found one tip especially helpful for the symptoms you describe :

Expect less of yourself. You aren't going to be functioning at full speed for a few weeks. Your body and brain have work to do, and this work will sometimes disrupt pedestrian traffic (usual activities). Think of it as a mild, long-lasting version of the flu.

If that fails, try a nicotine substitute like gum or lozenges.

If that fails, ask your doctor about medication like Chantix.

If that fails, try electronic cigarettes for temporary harm reduction. If it works for you, start dropping the nicotine levels of the e-cig.

If all this fails, try again. And again.


Jan 7, 2015

How did Nikola Tesla think of his invention ideas and how was he so ahead of his time?

In his writings, Tesla claimed he was suddenly struck by visions so clear and steady he momentarily couldn't distinguish them from reality. When such a vision appeared of the polyphase generator he says he asked the man next to him if he could see it too.

To me, this sounds a little melodramatic and mythic.

In any case it seems plausible that Tesla was a visual thinker who solved problems unconsciously - thus couldn't 'show his work', only complete solutions.


Jan 8, 2015

How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

Programmers working 80 hours a week is a huge, waving, back-lit red flag of a chaotic and unproductive organization. Deadline commitments are unrealistic, bugs are being introduced faster than being fixed, and your best programmers are drifting away.

I would never work at such a company, nor invest in it; in fact I'd be hesitant to even buy their product.

Would you like an appointment with a dentist who is on their 80th hour of work this week?


Jan 8, 2015

What was the nationality of Nikola Tesla?

Serbian.


Jan 9, 2015

Without studying, how can students get better marks?

This is the grave site of the revered, iconic American "Blue collar poet" Charles Bukowski:


In his will, he distilled his life to two words on his headstone: "Don't Try."

He didn't mean don't work, or make an attempt. What he meant was that you have unique talents - find them. You'll know they are talents because they gush out of you, it takes will-power to STOP doing them.

Don't struggle against your talents to be mediocre at something. Find your talent and discover your chance to be great at something.


Jan 9, 2015

If a high-intensity magnetic field hit earth, would all the data that we have stored in every possible data storage device get erased? What are the chances of such a thing happening?

A Gamma Ray Burst would do it.

Under the right conditions, as a star collapses into a black hole it can emit a narrow beam of intense electromagnetism throughout the EM spectrum.

Imagine the entire energy of our sun during it's lifetime hitting us in one second.

Not only would it wipe out your data, it would vaporize all your electronics, obliterate every living cell on earth. And blow off our atmosphere.

This can happen at any time, without warming.

So keep frequent backups.


Jan 11, 2015

Does adding cream & sugar to coffee dilute the caffeine in the coffee?

Quite the contrary; caffeine's stimulant effect speeds up the rate at which the brain burns glucose.

So sugar (sucrose) provides the fuel, caffeine lights the match.

The cream dilutes it so slightly the effect is neglible (unless your going nuts and making it half cream or something.)


Jan 12, 2015

Is it possible to ask for Quora credit donations so that I can ask someone to answer a question?

I've given away 100's of thousands of credits. You need only ask and have some motivation within Quora's policies (no spamming, etc)

Edit : I've A2A'd Joseph Wang for you.


Jan 12, 2015

Why is 0.999 equal to 1?

The following proof often satisfies newbies.

Mutiple 0.99999... by 10 to get 9.9999...

The number increased by 9 when you multiplied it by 10.

Only 1 does that.


Jan 13, 2015

Is there something like Quora where it is not allowed to counter-argue?

"Dude - I have an new spear !! It'll go farther and more accurately. I invented it myself!"

"Cool, where is it? I'll get mine and we can compare!"

"I haven't made it yet. I just *know* it's gonna work."

"Make it then! I'll wait."

"I can't make it because it requires a special bone I don't have."

"You don't have a better spear. You don't have a spear at all."

--Two guys, 60,000 BCE.


Jan 13, 2015

What is a good tagline for Earth?

Where the monkeys got out of hand.


Jan 13, 2015

Should Quora ban people who swear in answering or asking questions or warn them not to be inappropriate?

Quora will ban for personal attacks or hate-speech, but expletives are allowed. I agree with this boundary.

Expletives have their place in reasonable discussion. If a person is just being vulgar for no purpose, the crowd can be trusted to shun (down vote) their content. It's a question of quality, not policy.

Here's a post if mine which drops the f-bomb in the first sentence. In bold upper-case :

Christopher Reiss's answer to What does smoking cigarettes feel like, and should I try it?

The 1,400 people good enough to upvote it didn't seem to mind the language.

It was for emphasis. An appropriate emphasis, I believe. I would be shocked and dismayed if an Admin took issue with it.

But you're free to down-vote it, if you choose.


Jan 14, 2015

How does custom code work?

That's a bit like asking "How does a rental car work?"

The same way as an ordinary car that you own. Like custom code, the difference is that only you drive it and it belongs to you.


Jan 15, 2015

What is the perfect stock investment for a vape business?

It's hard to know which vape manufacturer will win, but as vaping catches on tobacco sales will drop more quickly.

You might consider short-selling tobacco.


Jan 16, 2015

How do I become friends with a guy?

At the risk of gender stereotyping :

Guys tend not to hold grudges, and tend to keep things simple emotionally.

I would walk up to him, make a joke like "I ran out of ways to be any more awkward, here's some Pez." Then hand him some Pez.

Hopefully he'll laugh, the ice is broken and by-gones are by-gones. Now you can just make light conversation.


Jan 16, 2015

What are the best things in the world that the coming generations will miss?

The polar caps.

And the coastal cities.


Jan 16, 2015

Can an employer come after you for quitting your job via a short email announcing your resignation?

Well, they can't come after you, but it sounds like you didn't give advanced notice (2 weeks minimum). This is kind of de rigeur, even if it's for such simple things as passwords, knowledge transfer, giving them a little head's-up time to replace you.

What you did was quitting rather than resigning, which is usually done either in anger or self-defense.

And there's a personal aspect to it; even if you didn't like the job it's nice to give everybody a chance to wish you well and maybe take you to lunch.

If your manager presses for reasons why, you can simply give the non-answer "It didn't hold my interest so I wanted to try elsewhere." If they push for specifics or ask you to name names, just repeat your non-answer.

If they get aggressive or raise their voice, simply stand up, wish them luck with the next person and walk out.

Be the gracious one no matter what.

That's actually good advice for any situation, I think.


Jan 19, 2015

What is the real shape of earth? And why do some people believe it is flat?

Technically, the earth is an Oblate spheroid, discounting local "noise" like mountains and such :


This is a sphere which is bulging a bit at the middle. (The cross-sections aren't circles, but ellipses which are nearly circles.) The bulge is due to the spin of the earth.

For all practical purposes it's a sphere.

Virtually nobody thinks it's flat. The ancient Greeks realized it was spherical, and even accurately measured its circumference by doing a clever experiment with shadows :



Eratosthenes experiment to measure circumference of Earth, ~250 BC.

There are a few ... individuals, who insist the earth is flat despite all arguments and evidence. For example, The Flat Earth Society . I honestly can't tell if they are nuts or joking, but they certainly aren't right.


Jan 19, 2015

My roommate suddenly started vomiting repeatedly last night and thinks he has the flu, but he had no previous symptoms and this was a rapid progression. Is this likely a stomach flu or influenza?

It could be the Norovirus, also called the "Stomach flu" or "cruise ship virus."

It comes on very quickly with vomiting and other GI distress. It is highly contagious and loves to spread in densely populated spaces like dormitories or ships.

It's transmitted primarily by the fecal-oral route (eeew.) So your room-mate should thoroughly wash their hands after going #2. It lives a long time on surfaces, so cleaning commonly touched (and bathroom) surfaces with bleach solution will kill it.

It's possible but less likely to get it through the air. If you are dead serious about avoiding it, wear gloves and a mask.

It typically lasts from 1-3 days.


Jan 20, 2015

Why do some Western artists, such as those with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, produce disrespectful works mocking Islam and the Prophet Muhammad that provoke and antagonize Muslims? Why can't they just learn to be more respectful?

Freedom is not freedom from offense.

It is freedom to express - even offensively - without fear of bodily harm at the hands of the state or of other people.

There is a website for the neonazi group "White aryan resistance." It features cartoons very offensive to my Jewish heritage.

I avoid their site. Most people do.

Few get offended. Everybody lives.


Jan 20, 2015

Can our DNA be traced to see that we are all really related to each other?

Yes - there is surprisingly little variation in the DNA of humans as opposed to other species.

This is due to evolutionary 'bottleneck' events. These are various environmental calamities that drastically reduced the human population.

For example, the Toba super-eruption (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) is considered to have reduced the global population to 3,000-10,000 people. This was ~ 50,000 years ago.

If this theory holds, all of us are descended from that tiny group, and any two modern people's blood-lines cross many times if we map their ancestry back 50,000 years.

There have been other bottleneck events as well.

In any case, we are all descended from the first single-celled creature, guaranteeing at least a very distant common ancestor. The bottle-neck events and sheer number of Homo Sapien generations make it virtually certain we all have common, human ancestors in the not-too-distant past.


Jan 21, 2015

Why do filmmakers, such as those who created "The Imitation Game," feel the need to make every genius character autistic?

The film does over simplify Turing's personality, he could be quite amicable.

I'd like to point out that there is no typical Aspie; some are quite good at social interaction, theory of mind, central coherence, etc. The DSM describes behavioral traits in a very inaccurate way.

Work by Volkmar at Yale and Simon Baron-Cohen at U Cambridge stress a difference in sensory processing, which can manifest in different ways and different degrees.

The strangest thing is that there appears to be a freakish link between Asperger's and genius, as Jill Uchiyama implied. Einstein, Mozart, Tesla and many others are speculated to be Aspie. Not the plodding success of the obsessive. But the visionary progress of those who think different. Ly.

This link - and the diversity among Aspies - is so generally unacceptable to NT's that I have hid my neurological status until now.

(NT's strike Aspies and competitive and allergic to scientific fact-checking. Neither of which lends itself to construct ive debate. The Aspies gave up a while ago on NT's)

Maybe this rift can eventually be repaired.

I'm Chris and I'm Aspie. I have trouble recognizing faces but remember virtually everything I've read. I think in pictures but never in words. And there are many other differences.

And yes, I've veered considerably off-topic. But there it is. As good a place as any.


Jan 22, 2015

What is the most awesome paradox?

A teacher says there will be a surprise test on some day next week.

It can't be on Friday, or else Thursday night everybody knows it's tomorrow.

It can't be on Thursday, or else Wednesday night everybody knows it must be tomorrow (given Friday is impossible).

And so on. It can't be given on any day.


Jan 22, 2015

What are some of the best ideas to make your mood better if you feel lonely?

Go for a walk. Make sure you have 5 one dollar bills.

I anoint you : Patron Saint of the Lonely.

Your mission is to go relieve the loneliness of others. If you see a homeless person, stop. Give them a dollar and apologize that you can't give more. Ask if you can sit for a few minutes because you're tired.

Find out their story. Where they come from. Where they're headed. How they get through the day.

If you see a street musician, stop. Put a dollar in their tin and then sit for 15 minutes listening. Thank them personally when you leave.

Stop by a few coffee shops. If you see an elderly person sitting alone, ask to join them. Use the white lie that you are new in town and the person reminds you of your departed grandparent. Ask them anything and they will usually open up.

Funny, you were lonely a while back. Now you can't really remember why.

Look out of any window,
any morning, any evening, any day.

Maybe the sun is shining
Birds are winging
Rain is falling from a heavy sky,
What do you want me to do,
To do for you to see you through?
...
Walk out of any doorway
Feel your way, feel your way
Like the day before
Maybe you'll find direction
Around some corner
Where it's been waiting to meet you,
...
Look into any eyes
You find by you, you can see
Clear through to another day
Maybe been seen before
Through other eyes on other days
While going home,
What do you want me to do,
To do for you to see you through?

It's all a dream we dreamed
One afternoon long ago
Walk into splintered sunlight
Inch your way through dead dreams
To another land
Maybe you're tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted
With words half spoken
And thoughts unclear
A box of rain will ease the pain
And love will see you through
Just a box of rain,
Wind and water,
Believe it if you need it,
If you don't just pass it on.
...
Such a short time to be here
And a long time to be gone.

-- Song Box Of Rain by The Grateful Dead

Jan 22, 2015

Why wasn't the discovery of the Higgs boson a world-changing event?

It's too fundamental to result in visible change right away.

For example, Einstein's General Relativity still has few visible consequences. However, without it, NASA would have missed the moon. It may yet give rise to teleportation via worm-holes and lots of other crazy-sounding technology.

The discovery of the Higgs boson sent shock-waves through the world of physics. It validated (convincingly but not absolutely) the 'Standard Model'.

This redirected the efforts of physicists who were working against the Standard Model.

Now that physicists are basically facing the same direction, they are likely to make more new discoveries which will eventually trickle into new technology.


Jan 22, 2015

Is there any way for a former asthmatic to stop dry coughing after quitting smoking?

I would definitely call your doctor on this one. It would probably be a 30 second call.

From a non doctor : After quitting smoking, a hacking cough is very common for a few weeks to a couple of months. Longer than this, I believe, is abnormal.

A dry cough can be greatly helped with a mixture of honey, lemon, and warm water. Also, humidity in your home and work-place should be around 40%.

But do call that doc. Don't entrust your lungs to strangers on the Internet.

And congrats on quitting smoking! Me too - 6 months now.


Jan 22, 2015

My laptop heats up too fast and shuts down automatically. I cannot even use Chrome and VLC at the same time. What should I do besides getting a new laptop?

Here's a simple trick you can use right now :

Raise the laptop about a quarter inch in the air. I use DVD cases or books. You want the books to be sticking out so that almost all the space below the laptop is air. (Especially don't block the intake ducts for the fan.)

Download a free temperature monitor, and watch your temp dive when you do this.


Jan 23, 2015

How do I find the right people for doing a bank robbery?

Goldman Sachs are hiring.


Jan 23, 2015

Are people who talk too much selfish?

They can be. I have a few unscientific tests acquired through my own experience with people to discern whether they are hopelessly self-centered or just gabby.

When they talk, do they avoid eye contact with you? Most people make intermittent eye contact when they are talking to check the state of the listener. There are many subtle non-verbal cues people give off. For example, when people wish to speak, they often part their lips slightly and tilt their head. They do lots of other things to indicate their level of interest, desire to speak, to end the discussion, etc. A self-centered long-talker will look away, their eyes often darting all over the place - but never at the listener. They are deliberately blocking your cues. In a very deep way they are not interested in your response or even your level of interest.

Are they speaking only about their interior world? Giving long and detailed accounts of their own experiences that don't lead to any conclusion? Dumping on you about their conflicts with others and their negative feelings? Is this all they ever talk about? Never art, literature, politics, or whatever external interests they have?

If both of these apply, I find the situation generally unfixable.


Jan 24, 2015

How do I prove that ab=0 if a=0 or b=0?

ab=0 by supposition.
Suppose a is non zero.
Divide both sides by a.
Then b=0.


Jan 25, 2015

What is the logic in making a child look up a word in the dictionary when they ask what it means, rather than just telling them the meaning?

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

When I was in high school, we had to learn to use trigonometry tables to calculate things like sin(x). A student complained that our calculator can do this instantly - why look it up?

The teacher responded that -- what if you don't have a calculator with you?

Alas -- the trigonometry emergency on a desert island with lacks calculators but somehow has trig tables -- never happened.

That was 30 years ago and I haven't seen a trig. table since.

In their adult life -- I doubt this child will ever even see a dictionary, much less use one.

There is - and has been for a long time - a severe lag in K-12 education and technology. Skills go extinct and the educational system takes decades to catch up.

For example,

Is it still worth years learning to write with a pen?

Is division and multiplication worth the effort?

Are there things about the Internet we need not teach - like what it is and how to use it?

Are there things we should add - like how to discern reliable sources from dubious.

For generations high schools have been graduating barely literate people, to fill the rank and file of office and company. The average American's effort at writing is painful to behold. Can we at last become a nation of writers? Er - typers?


Jan 25, 2015

Why don't some Top Writers reply to valid comments on their answers?

By 'valid comments' I take it you mean objections. There's a few reasons to not respond :

Top Writers get lots (and lots) of comments, and would rather keep writing than get caught into an increasing number of ongoing arguments.

There is a sense that the general public usually doesn't click through the comments.

We're giving the other guy the last word. Nothing wrong with that.

And last but not least ... (drum-roll) the commenter has the option of writing their own answer. There's plenty of room for c0nflicting answers. There is no need to get into long and tedious arguments.


Jan 26, 2015

Is there a better way of saying "is it wrong for us to force things to happen in order for a brighter future to be more possible for the people?"

"Sieg Heil !"

Harsh, I know. But by 'force' you must mean against the wishes and judgement of others. And that you know better. And will over-ride objections with physical force to achieve a bright future not all agree on.

I.e., fascism.


Jan 26, 2015

I am trying to raise money for a unique mobile game. I have everything on paper. How much of the company's net profits should I percent out to an investor?

I don't think you'll find any takers even if you give away 90%.

People don't invest in plans.

You should learn to write the game for find someone who's willing to help you do that for equity.


Jan 26, 2015

My first language is not English, so mostly I don't answer on Quora or avoid conversations because I think people will make fun of my grammar or language. How do I overcome it?

In three years on the site I have not once seen someone made fun of due to their English or grammar.

I invite you to jump right in. If there are mistakes, it is likely someone will fix them, in the form of 'suggested edits' for you to approve.

Quora has a strong culture of BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful.). Insulting people who are just trying to learn English would not be tolerated.


Jan 27, 2015

Do Americans believe "freedom of speech" allows the right to speak "hate"?

We tolerate the hateful idiocy of the KKK to preserve the rights of everyone to speak.

We can ignore the KKK. We cannot ignore the censor.


Feb 1, 2015

What is the best option to remote desktop to Ubuntu 14.04 from Windows?

Google TightVNC, it's a free open-sourced package I've found easy to work with.


Feb 1, 2015

What are logarithms used for? Are decibels a good example of the usefulness of a logarithm? Are logarithms calculus?

Logarithms turn multiplication into addition, since log(ab) = log(a)+log(b).

Addition is easier to do by hand.

Before computing, this was the principle behind a slide rule.


Feb 3, 2015

What is the current state of C# and .NET on Linux? How are the IDE/debugger/profiler tools compared to Eclipse (or tools in Java world)? What does MonoDevelop not provide that Visual Studio/ReSharper or Eclipse does?

Pump your breaks.

Do a u-turn and head back.

Startups have enough worries without using an exotic hybrid like .NET on Linux.

There are many years put into the stability and support of languages like Ruby, frameworks like Ruby on Rails, etc etc on Linux.

.NET has years of support on Windows.

Go with Linux and dump .NET or go with Windows/.NET and dump Linux.


Feb 3, 2015

Is it specifically illegal to produce counterfeit US currency in the nation of Costa Rica?

No. But you don't have to go that far.

It's legal to make counterfeit US bills in Washington DC. And Nashua, New Hampshire. And anywhere at all in the USA.

It is only illegal to produce and possess counterfeit currency with intent to defraud. That is, you spend it or plan on spending it. If you hang it on your wall you have broken no law.

The burden of proof that you intended to spend it lies with the prosecutor. You can imagine how hard this is; most counterfeiting cases involve bills that are actually being spent, dispensing with the issue of intent.

This is specified in US Code Title 18, Chapter 25, Section 471 :

CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

"Whoever, with intent to defraud, falsely makes, forges, counterfeits, or alters any obligation or other security of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both."


I wouldn't do it anyway, because the legal system is imperfect and does make mistakes.

Note - I'm not a lawyer and desperately hope never to be one.


Feb 4, 2015

Why should I tip when servers are just acting nice to get a better tip rather than because they really care about you?

You're not tipping them for being nice, you're tipping them for serving you.

It is true that also being nice often garners bigger tips, but in some contexts it's actually bad form. In very high-priced and exclusive restaurants, staff can get in trouble for being "too familiar"; they are expected to assume a flat and deferential affect, even to the point of avoiding eye-contact.


Feb 10, 2015

Can sleeping with a fan running next to your face be dangerous? Can it cause suffocation? Is “fan death” true?

Nope - you are perfectly safe sleeping with a fan next to you (so long as it doesn't fall on your head!).

Korean Fan Death

This is just one of those rumors that got repeated so often (in Korea) that it attained the status of fact.

Variants exist like : in the USA, folklore has it that a baby should not sleep with a cat in the room, because the cat may lay on the infant, breathing into their face thus "stealing their breath."

The key to the success of such rumors is that :

They have a faint basis in science. The fan will create some bernoulli-force vacuum across your face. It's just not even close to a thousandth of what would interfere with your breathing. Same with the CO2 exhaled by an infant-loving cat.

The cost of wrongly discounting them is high. (You or somebody else dies.)

Snopes is a good resource for checking any information that seems fishy.


Feb 10, 2015

What is the math law (equation) for determining how much colder it is now than it was before?

The "zero" mark in both Centigrade and Farenheit is arbitrary and has no basis in nature.

This leads to absurdities like -10 C is negative two times colder than 5 C, that is - twice as warm.

Instead, we have to convert to Kelvin. This has a zero at about -273 C. This is the point at which there is no kinetic energy at all in the molecules - everything has stopped.

A degree Kelvin is the same as a degree Centigrade (for practical purposes.)
This is the scale physicists use because the zero point is a meaningful singularity (there are no negative temperatures in Kelvin, btw).

To your example, comparing 10C to 20C.

10C = 283K and 20C = 293K.

20C is thus warmer by 293/283 = 1.04, or 4 percent. 4 percent of what is rather involved (average kinetic energy of molecules Heat and Temperature), but at least you don't end up with weird paradoxes using Kelvin.


Feb 11, 2015

What are the optimum voltage/wattage settings for a vaporizer?

Find the resistance of your atomizer/cartomizers (Ohms) and use this chart :


Or more simply, go by taste. Small vapor output = too low voltage. High voltage = burnt taste.


Feb 12, 2015

What are some of the costliest mistakes ever made in history?

In 1347, several merchant ships slowly pulled into the port of Messina, Italy.

Most of the crew were dead, and the few left were very sick.

The local authorities immediately sensed something was wrong and would not allow the crews to unload or leave the ship.

Enterprising looters saw that the crews were in no position to defend themselves, came aboard and stole some cargo.

Thus the Black Death entered Europe, killing 1/3 of the population.


Feb 12, 2015

Is experiencing emotional fluctuation from a 6 month binge drinking time, still a symptom of withdrawal even after 2-3 weeks?

Yes, google "Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS)".

As a rule of thumb, it's often said to last half the period you were drinking (6/2=3 months) in this case. But I'm sure this is just a very rough estimate.

Congrats on ending your binge, I would wager you'll feel better soon.


Feb 12, 2015

What sentence could ruin a date immediately?

"It's so freshing to finally date someone without an STD."


Feb 13, 2015

Did the US really benefit by participating in WW2?

Ecomomically, WW II was the biggest economic boon to ever befall a nation in all of civilization.

For just one metric : by war's end 50% of the World's gold supply was in the hands of the US.

The US had grown mega-wealthy by supplying the allies (*cough*, mostly just them) with oil, steel, weapons, etc. America was the 'great arsenal' of the war.

Not a single bomb fell on American soil as its industrial capacity was revved to white hot, and women were inducted into the workforce.

In the Post-War era, America went from 'arsenal to the allies' to 'supermarket to the world.' The industrialized world was bombed out and had to buy from the USA. For example, 80% of the world's automobiles were US made in 1950.

The 'Post War Economic Boom' turned the USA into a global collasus new to the human experience.

Politically, WWII was disastrous to the USA. The US government fell under the influence of the "military industrial complex" (to paraphrase Eisenhower [EDIT - thanks to Scott Soloway for correction].). The CIA was born and became a shadow government, lurking beyond public scrutiny. The consitutional guarantee that 'congress shall have the power to make war' went out the window as undeclared wars erupted in Korea and Vietnam.

We have lost the moral high ground and endure a permanent state of war.


Feb 15, 2015

If Hitler hadn't declared war on the US, would the USSR and the UK ever have been able to defeat Nazi Germany?

Every indication is that the Soviet forces were unstoppable. Had the USA not entered the war, Great Britain would have probably held their islands, as the Red Army destroyed the Third Reich.


Feb 15, 2015

I asked a guy out for coffee, but he refused me. Why doesn't he like me?

Everybody : chill out! Her question was rhetorical. She was upset and feels better after venting, she says.

Admins : I technically have to answer her question so ... It's hard to say. He may be into somebody else. Or another gender. Or be asexual. Or you're too tall/short, skinny/heavy, or not the right hair color - it could be anything. Chemistry is mysterious and even he may be unable to tell you.

Poster : Glad you feel better. And at least you had the courage to ask. Hang onto that, it'll take you far.


Feb 16, 2015

My boyfriend was too concerned with himself when he got a small cut from a knife. I think he is not a real man. Am I wrong?

A cut, no matter the size, demands immediate attention.

It needs to be washed out, disinfected and bandaged. If it doesn't stop bleeding the person has to go get stitches.

Nothing to freak out about, but it's a priority. If you don't do the first aide quickly you can end up with nasty complications (infections.)

So he's not a wimp if he does these things. Just a realist.

And hey - if you get injured it sounds like he's got you covered. And like he's already got some Dad skills if you're of a mind to have kids some day.


Feb 18, 2015

How could Godel and other mathematicians memorize extremely complex mathematics?

About the last thing you need in mathematics is memorization.

Let me be more pointed : An undergraduate degree in mathematics - or major new research - requires less memorization than any other topic.

Mathematics deals in principles. Math students and researchers memorize a few principles, and cultivate the art of deriving theorems. They are guided by experience, by beauty and simplicity (they say 'elegance').

Once they understand something, it becomes nearly impossible to forget. Your question is a bit like, "How does a bicyclist keep track of two wheels, two pedals, their motion and speed and tilt all at once?" They understand it deeply enough that they don't have to.

For example - my memory is not good. Godel's theorem? OK :

"Every axiomatic system strong enough to support arithmetic is either incomplete or omega-inconsistent."

Did I look it up just now? Nope. Did I memorize it back then? Nope. It's the most beautiful and profound theorem I've ever learned.

Unforgettable.


Feb 19, 2015

Is it ever too late for someone to learn how to program?

No, it's too early.

By the time you graduate college - in eight years - there will be more interesting and profitable options than a job at Google.

You may even found it yourself.


Feb 19, 2015

Why do I keep on getting unsettling, confusing dreams?

Nobody is sure what causes intense dreams or how to interpret them. Freud and Jung thought them to be highly meaningful. Just not all the time. Freud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Lots of phsychiatrists believe : dreams are messages from our unconscious. They are often about something painful, and they are often *coded*. Puns and visual metaphor are common.

For example, you dream of your sister being electrocuted, while her fiancé stands by impassively. Is their something you're worried that she might find *shocking* ?

Like - she is a virgin, and sex may be a big deal? But not to her fiancé?

Just throwing it out there as an example of how dreams may code a real world concern.

Your dream of being unprepared for an exam is nearly universal. I've had them, most people I know have. Maybe you are neglecting something right now, or just reliving your student anxiety.

You dreamt that you've died (which is unusual on dreams) and your mom is encouraging your wife to remarry. Perhaps you signed life insurance to benefit her, and were startled at how the prospect of your death was handled so dispassionately with the stroke of a pen - in your presence, with the knowledge of loved ones.

Just a thought. Only you can figure the dream out - if there is anything to figure out.

Traveling is a very common theme in dreams. People dream of cars, planes, bicycles, boats. These are often taken as symbols of freedom.

Dreaming that - for example - your car keeps breaking down (or a flight goes to an unexpected location) can indicate you are concerned about your freedom.

Only you can tell what interpretation rings true. Understanding the dream's message often stops the dream from coming back.

Intense dreaming can also be caused by a host of medications, from anti-depressants to the nicotine patch. Even caffeine can do it.


Feb 22, 2015

Was I correct to feel like I'd been treated like a sucker after donating money to Wikipedia? I read Jimmy Wales's personal appeal for funds for Wikipedia a couple of years ago and I sent maybe $25, since I use Wikipedia almost every day.

Such software glitches are an indicator that yea, they need the money, and your donation was well spent.

Wikipedia is really getting by on a shoe-string budget, compared to other sites with similar traffic and volume of content.


Feb 23, 2015

What would happen if you put a socialist and a libertarian in the same room?

The libertarian would pick the lock and escape, ignoring the socialist's exhortations to stay and starve with him.


Feb 23, 2015

Which technologies are the so called 'write once, run anywhere' (such as Java)?

This was the great hope of almost major language since Lisp.

What usually happens is they start off cross-platform, but as performance concerns overcome portability concerns, hardware specific libraries and even syntax gets introduced.

It's getting better, though. Python is good at holding the line on "write once deploy everywhere", for example.

Qt/C++ is pretty good for cross-platform GUI-based apps

Also, with the emergence of the web, JavaScript/JQuery/HTML5/CSS3 are trying really hard and are pretty close. Browser idiosyncrasies do exist are becoming more managable.


Feb 24, 2015

How would you complete this sentence: “Sometimes, all you can do is ...”?

Type an ellipses ...


Feb 25, 2015

What are amazing facts about Quora?

Jimmy Wales writes more content here than on Wikipedia.


Feb 28, 2015

My girlfriend doesn't accept any gifts. Is that normal? We’ve been in a relationship for a year now. She doesn’t even dine out with me.

No but does she have a sister?


Feb 28, 2015

What are some of the wittiest pieces of sarcasm?

"Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us that do."

(OK, not technically sarcasm.)


Feb 28, 2015

How can I accelerate my personal growth efficiently?

You are not a Petri dish being plotted on a spreadsheet. You are a miraculously unique child of the universe.

Explore, learn, contact and create.


Feb 28, 2015

I am a girl who studies at a world's top university, plays music, speaks a few languages, cooks well, is friendly and good-looking. Why am I single?

You're not. You're dating yourself.

Abandon your self-interest and look for the great things in others.


Mar 1, 2015

How can I control my anger?

If I could go back in time, with a gun and three bullets, and sat in a room with Mussolini, Stalin and Freud :

I'd shoot Freud three times.

An adult sees a cookie jar, but knows cookies are unhealthy, so walks past.

The desire for a cookie does not *build* - if we *repress* or *deny* it, until a pipe bursts and we become cookie-crazed maniacs.

We do not need to investigate the desire for a cookie (we were denied a cookie as a child!). The desire for a cookie isn't rooted in some deeper truth. It's just a cookie.

You don't need to confront the person who put the cookies there.

You don't need to see a professional to resolve your cookie issues.

Negative feelings, like cookies, are fleeting and unhealthy. Just walk past.

Freud and his followers will get over it.


Mar 2, 2015

What is the best way to cause confusion?

Put 20 different colored toothbrushes in your shirt pocket. Whenever somebody asks about them, smile,
nod your head, say "niiiiiiiice" and hand them an acorn.


Mar 3, 2015

What is the most beautiful representation of a transcendental number you have ever come across?

This continued fraction for e gets my vote :


Mar 3, 2015

What are some 'facts' still being taught in school, that have been proven to be false?

That Columbus was a great explorer.

He was actuually more of a ... well ... stubborn idiot.

Everyone knew the world was round, and that you could sail to India sailing west. The distance around the earth was also known. Columbus was told that his west-ward sail was way over 10,000 miles to India. That he and his crew would starve long before they got there.

Which they would have, had they not stumbled upon the Americas. Which Columbus insisted was India. Plenty of tradesmen back in Spain had been to India and could have set Columbus straight.

As usual, Columbus paid them no mind and died without knowing he had discovered a vast continent unknown to Europe.


Mar 4, 2015

Patent Law: Is Apple right in its efforts to ban eight Samsung devices from US markets?

As Anonymous says, there is no right and wrong here. Apple's obligations are to its stockholders, customers, and employees (in roughly that order.)

It is obliged - by law - to maximize profits by every means legal and ethical.

So their lawyers will try to protect their IP to the maximum degree possible.

Samsung will try to balance maximum profit with not running infringing on Apple's IP.

Things are bound to get unclear at some point and a court makes the determination of right versus wrong.


Mar 4, 2015

Why are teleological claims considered invalid in evolutionary biology?

Evolution doesn't involve any sentience - no desires, no plans, no goals.

Creatures which tend to survive and produce offspring which also tend to survive and produce .... Thrive. Others fade away.

We often speak of evolution anthropomorphically : "Viruses don't want to kill their host. They really want the host healthy to walk around and spread the virus."

But this is just a euphemism. The virus doesn't really want anything. It just tends to thrive biologically under these conditions.


Mar 4, 2015

How could I gain weight in a healthy way?

I just did this! I was 20 lbs underweight and wanted to correct that.

Some tips I learned :

Be patient. It took a few months.

Don't step on a scale. Some weeks I made no progress, others I zoomed up. Short-term progress wasnt a good metric.

Eat breakfast, if you tend to skip it.

Eat two other nutritious, balanced meals. Eat a little faster than usual.

Indulge! Now that you've got your basic nutrition covered, eat anything that strikes your fancy. Can be junk food - anything with lots of calories. Cake, fruit loops, chocolate, whatever! You, Sir (or Ma'am), have a License To Munch until you hit your weight goal (careful not to ruin your appetite for meals with snacks. After a meal is best.)


Mar 5, 2015

How does libertarianism realistically address the problem of hunger and poverty? How do we get to a solution from where we currently are while minimizing the suffering in the interim?

As others have said, Libertarianism doesn't address hunger or other issues of poverty.

BUT. Libertarianism doesn't oppose charity, either. It simply states that government should concern itself only with the necessary use of force.

Charity cannot be coerced by force (which is what we do now, via taxes.)

In many past cultures, through churches or other organizations, food and shelter was provided to the poor through voluntary contributions.

This is both human decency and has "spill-over" benefits : the starving steal and commit crimes.

In short, Libertarianism says, "you hungry? I might make you a sandwich. I might not. Just don't put a gun to my head."


Mar 6, 2015

If I run fast, will that cause any time dilation, not measurable of course but theoretically?

Yup.

If you sprint a hundred meters and back while I hold still, you will have aged ever-so-slightly more than I have.

And no need to exert yourself. You can just sit back and let the spin of the earth do it. Just sitting where you are, the spin of the earth is slowing down your watch slightly compared to someone at the north pole (who's just rotating.)


Mar 6, 2015

Is it possible to accidentally split an atom and cause a nuclear explosion, like someone slicing an apple, who accidentally sliced through the exact center of an atom? Could it cause an explosion, no matter how unlikely?

You have to do a lot more than split an atom. You need a very high (critical) mass and density of an already unstable (ready to split) isotope like Plutonium 239. Then you have to spray the thing with lots of neutrons AND use some mechanism to squeeze the thing together - very hard - so that the chain reaction doesn't go off with a fizzle as the initial heat from the chain reaction just pushes away the plutonium before the reaction really takes off.

For Plutonium 239, a carefully timed and arranged implosion is used to both increases the density and hold the thing together in the early stages of the chain reaction.


Just splitting an atom ? That's harmless and quite common :


This is a clock from 1950. It's not electric, it's wind-up. But it glows. And not the put-it-in-light-first type of glowing - it always glows.

That dial is painted with Radium. Radium atoms split all the time, spitting out neutrons and other particles. Another chemical catches these particles and glows. This is called Radioluminescence.

No danger this clock will explode. But I wouldn't want one. Turns out radiation causes cancer; and the poor women who worked at these factories suffered a variety of ailments and filed a land-mark lawsuit that got global attention : Radium Girls .


Mar 7, 2015

Does Roger Penrose's observation that the probability of the occurrence of a universe in which life can form is 10 to the power of 123 to 1 support the case of those who believe in God?

It can.

It's an interesting quote by Penrose. I wonder how he arrived at that number. I would take it to be a guess.

There's a bit of a problem applying it to historical events - things that occurred in the past. For example, I could write down a 100 digit number. The chances of my writing that particular number is 1 in 10^100.

But let's step around that issue, and do a thought experiment.

Let's grab a Cosmos and watch. The null hypothesis is that nothing is interfering with the Cosmos to cause life, that it is isolated from any life-causing influences.

And poof! Life appears. We can reject the null hypothesis that no external force induced life with a confidence of 99.99 ... to 123 digits. Near certainty.

Now we've got to know the number of Cosmoses (sp?). Is the Big Bang a singular event? Did it happen a fixed number of times? An infinite number? Let's call this value C.

So C*(1/10^123) is the chance of life ever ocuring. If C* (1/10^123) is absurdly small, we can reject the null hypothesis that life arose through an isolated, random process with the caveat we should apply probability only to future events, that Penrose is right and a bunch of other assumptions.

Thought experiment aside, Penrose's number is at the heart of the matter. If random interaction leading to life is absurdly improbable - we have a mystery on our hands. This doesn't mean that science is wrong or that God exists.

It means only that there is *something* we don't know yet about how life emerges. Scientist, theologian and mystic are all still in business.


Mar 7, 2015

Our shower was shocking us and the landlord didn't seem to care about our health and safety. Can we sue him and if so, what would be a reasonable amount?

Are you still living there? Your options vary by state but generally amount to getting the problem fixed and compensating you for any expenses reasonably incurred as a result of the problem.

For example, you may be able to call an electrician and deduct the bill from the rent. Your lease may have been rendered invalid and your landlord liable for moving or hotel expenses.

I wouldn't step foot in that shower, first call an electrician and then call a lawyer. Most lawyers will consult for free for 15 minutes or so.

It's not likely you're going to make a lot of money from this; if nobody is hurt the court seeks to remedy the situation fairly. Claims for such thing like "pain and suffering" usually require substantial injury and proof.


Mar 7, 2015

Do women like big muscular men or do they prefer the thinner, leaner ones?

As a male math major who weighs 150 lbs soaking wet I can assure you that woman prefer their men skinny, average height and brainy.


Mar 12, 2015

Does temperature influence time and space?

Yes.

The hotter an object, the greater the average mass-energy of the particles that it comprises. (They have greater kinetic energy.)

According to General Relativity, this creates greater "bending" of the surrounding space-time.


Mar 13, 2015

Who is killing Quora?

I've been on Quora a long time, have been the happy recipient of many upvotes, followers, and even two Top Writer badges.

When Quora began as a 'gated community' (you had to have an invite to get in), I couldn't come on the site. Most of Quora's best and prolific writers joined after the gate came down, I believe.

Or perhaps you speak metaphorically of 'gated', as in "it used to be good, and now - not so much."

I must say I don't see it. A lot of junk does float in, but it gets sunk by downvotes. The quality and scope has risen over time, as far as I can see.

You say you get emails asking you to answer dumb questions. Are people inboxing you here? Because that's unusual, I have never been asked that way.

Or are people using the A2A option, which is sending notifications to your regular email?

In any case, as Quora has grown you may find it necessary to tweak your settings to suit your desired level of involvement. For instance, I turned off e-mail notifications, there were just too many. You can raise your A2A price, change the topics and people you follow, and block anyone who just annoys you.

Nobody's killing Quora; but your personal experience of it may be dying for lack of a few simple tweaks.


Mar 13, 2015

What are some real life demonstrations of the Earth's rotation without reference to other celestial bodies, like the moon, the sun, or stars?

This is a fun experiment for kids that is actually not too hard to build. Just make yourself a big, heavy pendulum that can swing freely in all directions :


The fancy name for this is a Foucault pendulum. The pendulum will swing back and forth, but the swing will also rotate once every 24 hours, because the earth is spinning underneath it.

(To see why the ground is spinning, imagine yourself standing at the north pole. The spin is obvious. A little farther down, the floor is still spinning - just less so, as it's now also flipping head-over-heels. At the equator, the experiment won't work as all the rotation is now head-over-heels.)

If you look carefully, you'll notice some sticks that are knocked over. This is so you don't have to watch the thing for a day, just come back and check on the sticks. You'll see it is, indeed, sweeping out a circle. (And hey! You just invented a clock!)


Mar 14, 2015

What can men do to lean out?

I take it this is in reference to Sheryl Sandberg's rallying cry to women: "Lean in." I must confess I don't like massive, social, "branded" movements like this. I personally suspect them of feeding the ego of their originators. (To be fair, that's just a gut reaction of mine, not based on any evidence, and certainly not a criticism of Sheryl.)

But "Lean In" makes a good point that both genders can benefit from. I will take that expression at its most literal:

I've been in many meetings where a few assertive male voices have dominated the meeting and its conclusions. I myself have been one of those pushy loudmouths.

It took some experience for me to learn a few things. Everybody should lean out enough so that others have a chance to lean in. In meetings,

Limit the scope and time that you take up yourself. This is not a pilgrimage to your brilliance. It's a meeting. Share the space.

If somebody else is dominating the meeting's time, interrupt them -- politely at first and rudely if they persist -- asking them to email the group the remainder of their lecture. If they still persist, threaten to walk out. It's that important.

Scan the room for those who have been silent. Often they are younger females, but not always. Suggest that "After Tom has done, let's hear from Lisa. She's been quiet." This will give her some heads-up that the group does indeed want to hear from her, and some time to compose her thoughts.

I've done this many times and I've found it's only necessary a couple of times before more assertive (usually male) people back up permanently. And I've heard some startlingly good ideas from the quieter (often female) members once they get a chance to speak.

Let's not calling it Leaning Out.

Just Leaning Back.

The results are often amazing.


Mar 14, 2015

Why do people smoke?

It is possible that many people continue to smoke because they are naturally deficient in Dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter produced in the brain.

Nicotine (and some other stimulants like caffeine) both mimic and increase dopamine (Psychology Today).

So when smokers, aware of the health risks, try to stop - their naturally low dopamine asserts itself, interfering with mood, focus, sleep, etc.

It should be noted that safe medications do exist to correct for low dopamine. A great many smokers may be in need of some simple medical intervention.

Note : 1) I am not a doctor and 2) You should talk to one if all this sounds familiar.


Mar 14, 2015

What are common euphemisms for someone having died?

The definitive Monty Python list, from the famous Dead Parrot skit.

Start at 2:15


'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!
'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies!
'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig!
'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!'

Mar 14, 2015

What are good ways to insult a computer scientist?

Computer SCIENTIST ? Any new empirical evidence show up lately ?

That Turing Machine doing backflips or what?


Mar 14, 2015

If something happens such as a cause, why must the effect necessarily happen, too? What magical enforcement mechanism exists to ensure physical laws are always obeyed?

This is a very illuminating and deep question, that goes to the heart of the scientific method.

At issue is the principle of Inductive reasoning. I hold a rock, and let go.
It drops. I do it again. It drops again. You do it. Same thing.

As this experience accumulates, we come to posit a principle. That any time anybody lets go of a rock, it drops. Over time we refine the principle to a theory of gravity : that all objects attract according to a certain equation. Our understanding becomes more precise (any object heavier than air will drop when let go.)

And anyone is free to reproduce the experiment and check the equation.

And it works. But here's the thing : We cannot directly observe the laws, only their effects. By doing the same thing over and over. So we're very, very confident that laws exist and the same experiment will repeat.

But we can't prove it. In the end, the only support for Inductive Reasoning is Inductive Reasoning itself. It has always worked, so must continue to work.

So Science is essentially built on circular reasoning. Our stubborn - and not logically substantiated - confidence in Inductive Reasoning is .... well ...

Faith?


Mar 15, 2015

How could you move Mars into the same orbit as Earth (to make it more habitable) and how could you speed up the rotation to make the gravity the same as Earth's?

In addition to Robert Frost's exhaustive analysis, even if it were possible, it would be a terrible idea.

You see, it's been tried. OK, not tried but happened. 4.5 billion years ago, there was a mars-sized planet called Theia (planet). It got near to earth's orbit in the formative days of our solar system. It ended, well - badly :


Any two planets that are so close and moving in the same path are eventually going to attract each other and collide. The collision with Theia almost destroyed Earth :


So much energy was imparted that a good deal of the planet was vaporized, all of it was liquified, and a huge part was ejected into space, never to return.

The ejected piece reformed into this familiar body :


The collision also knocked the earth's axis of rotation into another position. Most planets start off rotating on an axis straight up-and-down (perpendicular to their orbit).


The tilt, of course, gave us seasons :


It was all for the best, in the end. The tidal forces of the moon slowed down the earth's spin and transferred heat from the equator to the poles.

So the over-all temperature was normalized, but the minor variations brought on by season change and once huge tidal waves applied evolutionary pressure for life to become more adaptable, and thus survive later Extinction events.

So having mars in our orbit 4.5 billion years ago was a good thing. Having it there now would be doomsday, strictly in the interest of this guy :

* Thanks to the reader and to Quora for putting up with all the images. I'm a visual thinker and wrote this over my cup of morning coffee.


Mar 15, 2015

Should I be myself even if that means being brutally honest all the times?

I like Graeme Shimmin's answer, and it reminds me of a similar incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles were discovered in Cuba. Kennedy got on TV, and wanted to say, "If a missile is fired out of Cuba at anybody, I will order the 20 bombers - currently airborne 2 hours from Soviet airspace - to attack the Soviet Union with their full payload of hydrogen bombs. Kiss your cities good-bye."

What he said was this :

" It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." -- President John F Kennedy, 1961.


As Graeme Shimmin points out, sometimes it's all about the delivery.


Mar 15, 2015

What books of science attempt to answer deep philosophical questions?

My favorites :

Gödel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. This Pulitzer Prize winning book breaks down Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for a lay audience, and touches on questions of sentience and epistemology.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Here Hawking tackles the question of : What is time ? Does it move forward? Or do we? What is time's relationship to entropy? To consciousness? To the Big Bang?


Mar 15, 2015

What are some lesser known tricks to help answer multiple choice questions?

Yes, all these suggestions are good :

The Rules for Intelligent Guessing On Multiple Choice Exams Con't

To which I'll add my own for time management. Most exams like SAT/GRE etc are done under time duress. It is critical not to get bogged down and miss ten easy questions just because the clock ran out before you got to them.

So whip through all the easy ones as fast as possible. These are ones which require little work and in whose answer you are very confident. Go all the way to the end this way, leaving the others blank.

OK - now pass two. Check the time, and roughly calculate how much time you have to spend on each of the remaining questions. If any question takes longer than this, leave it blank and move on.

If you can do the question in the alotted time, but you're not entirely confident, make a small mark next to the question and move on.

Continue till end of test. By design, you will still have time left.

Go through all the questions you marked as uncertain and start double checking them.

If you complete this before the time is up, start going for the ones you left blank (or guessed it but marked with a small G.)

This time-management trick not only keeps you from getting clobbered from the clock, but also helps keep your confidence up as you start by answering correctly and confidentally.


Mar 16, 2015

Why does this magic trick work?

This is a demonstration of the center of gravity. The center of gravity essentially finds the summation of gravity over all parts of the object.

Note the left-right symmetry of the forks+penny. So when we sum (integrate) , the left-right parts cancel out and we end up with a point somewhere on an imaginary line from the tip of the penny to where the penny touches the glass.

The penny has been moved back and forth and voila - the center of gravity is where the penny touches.

(EDIT. Dammit, what Alan Marble just said.)


Mar 16, 2015

How did the Germans not know that the British cracked Enigma?

To add to Ken Fishkin's excellent answer, the Enigma cypher was not being used properly in the field.

The operators were supposed to use a new 3 letter key each day. These were to be chosen randomly. Operators often used simply 'AAA' or 'ZZZ'.

Every now and then, an operator was ordered to transmit garbage text in order to confound code breakers. At least one operator simply transmitted "LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL....".

This actually gave away a lot of information to crackers.

German culture is known for its bureaucratic formality, so many communications began with the same heading addressing the commanding officer.

Certain messages were sent, identically, through both enigma and other less sophisticated cyphers.

All of these errors opened the door a bit wider to cracking the code.

Had Enigma been used properly throughout the war, it probably never would have been cracked. The Germans thought it was being used properly. Hence their confidence in it.

(I often refer to this as a perfect example of : it's not enough to give orders, one must tell the person why they must do it that way. Had these operators been told, "Do it this way or else the Allies might crack the code and it'll be your fault. Have fun explaining that to Hitler.", I doubt these errors would have occurred.)


Mar 16, 2015

How do I paint professional mathematicians with shame?

Mention Edward Witten's Fields Medal.


Mar 16, 2015

Is there any scientific evidence for not vaccinating kids?

There's no scientific basis.

Most of the current anti-vaxxers point to research by a paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield made all sorts of basic research errors, and withdrew his paper from the medical journal Lancet. The New York Times. He was later stripped of his medical license.

In the distant past (18th century), certain "vaccines" were used against smallpox which killed 1 in 50 or so. Victim's body fluids (usually pus) were smeared onto a patient's skin, where small cuts were made. The patient would get a milder version of the pox, but survive 98% of the time. Those were good odds during a smallpox outbreak.

There was also a misunderstanding during the Ford Administration in 1976.
An outbreak of the Swine Flu was predicted, and the Ford Administration embarked on a campaign to vaccinate the whole country.

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum

When asked about side-effects, a doctor warned of the danger of mixing up causation with correlation. As an example, he said that suppose a patient got the vaccine, and then within 48 hours developed Guillain-Barré syndrome (a neurological condition of mysterious origins.) The GB will be blamed on the vaccine automatically, without any causal relationship being shown (like the total number of GB patients jumping up the year of the vaccine.)

The doctor's point was misunderstood, and people thought he might be suggesting the vaccine caused GB Syndrome. Thus most cases of GB syndrome that occurred were blamed on the vaccine. Lawsuits were filed and headlines made. Ford was embarassed when the Swine Flu didn't show up. When it later became clear that there was no general rise in the number of GB cases - that random chance, not the vaccine was to blame - the press had lost interest. The suspicion lingered in the public consciousness.

The only basis in avoiding vaccines is bad, debunked science, pure ignorance, or wacky conspiracy theories.

The bottom line is, statistically, by not immunizing a child you greatly increase their chance of death or disability by a serious disease. You also endanger other children in the community as "herd immunity" is weakened.


Mar 17, 2015

I am a 17 year old in university and my teacher says I shouldn't start to learn a programming language. He says to focus on flowchart algorithms and when I'm good at it, I can start to learn programming. Is this true or should I start learning right now?

There's just plain wrong, and then there's Ghastly Bad Advice.

For example, a class-mate tells you that toilets flow counter-clockwise below the equator.

He's just plain wrong. You look it up, and shrug it off with a snicker.

In the 1950's, doctors would often recommend that overweight patients (especially women after a pregnancy) take up cigarette smoking to lose weight. The dangers of cigarettes were unknown at the time.

Were a doctor to say that today, it's Ghastly Bad Advice that can't be snickered off. The difference between this and simply wrong is :

The person telling has assumed responsibility to keep reasonably up to date in their field of expertise. The advice is decades old and been thoroughly rebuked.

The advice has the potential to do harm.

The person giving the advice may harm you through ignorance in other ways - you have a bad doctor.


So a teacher advises you to make flow-charts. As you can see from all the other answers, that's wrong.

It's also Ghastly Bad Advice (see criteria). Which means you have a bigger problem.

Will this teacher ever be your teacher? Do other teachers feel the same way? How does the chairman of the department feel?

I would use this question as a litmus test. Go ask other teachers. And the department head.

If it's just one teacher - avoid taking *anything* with them. If it's more than one - or it includes the department head - it's time to leave.

Lots of good doctors out there.


Mar 17, 2015

What do you make of new allegations that Sasha and Malia Obama are adopted or born by surrogate?

That even if the girls were hatched on Neptune,

The minor children of any president should not be discussed in any public forum, especially Quora which maintains a high standard of discourse.


Mar 17, 2015

What is the greatest trick in mathematics?

Look for symmetry.

For example, two teams play a series of baseball games. The series goes on until one team is three wins ahead of the other.

Prove the apparently obvious fact the expected length of the series is greatest when the teams are evenly matched (This is an actual 'monthly problem' poses in the American Mathematically Monthly some years ago.)

So label the teams A and B. Pa is the chance that A wins a given game ( = 1 - Pb).

L(Pa) is the expected length of the series.

OK - stop! Don't calculate L(x).

Observe that L(p) = L(1-p) (we could just switch team labels).

Suppose L(p) is at a maximum for p not = 0.5. Call that pMax.

Then there is a second extremum at L(1-Pmax)

If L() is a 'well behaved' function, (continuous, differentiable everywhere),
and it has *two* distinct maxima, then it must also have a local minimum between them.

That's too much twisting. Prove that L()'s derivative can't have 3 distinct zeros and you're done. (And your proof is more illuminating.)

I've probably left out an important detail, but you get the idea. Symmetry can be used to avoid (and render irrelevant) very hard calculations.


Mar 18, 2015

If Quora had an official mascot, what would it be?

Why, the ever Qurious Quat, of course.


Mar 18, 2015

What is going on with these laser spots?

You're picking up defects on the steel surface, which is not perfectly flat.

You can verify this by placing a mirror on the table.

In fact, I think one can see the vertical striations on the table in the picture, which would lead to just that kind of a smear.


Mar 18, 2015

What are the best practices for a non-technical person to communicate with developers?

We are quite fluent in our native tongue.


Mar 19, 2015

What makes a good theory?

In addition to Steve Blumenkranz's good answer, the theory must be :

Falsifiable. This is usually, but not always a result of Steve's #2 - predictive ability. (The prediction may be technically difficult or require an improbable event.) String theory is sometimes criticized for being unfalsifiable since the curled up extra dimensions are way, way to small to detect (though it's predictive ability is not affected by this.)

As simple as possible, without loss of repeatability, predictive capacity or falsifiability. For a trivial example, e=mc^2 should be in simplest form, not e=2em^2/sqrt(4). For a real example, Edward Witten re-invigorated string theory when he was able to take five competing string theory models and reduce all of them to a single M-theory.

As a nice-to-have, a theory may lay out exactly how to confirm or reject it. For example, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity laid out precisely the expected results of celestial observations made during a lunar eclipse.


Mar 19, 2015

Given three vectors: p1= (3,-2,1), p2= (-1,1,-2) and p3= (2,1,-3), resolve a= (-1,8,-13) in the directions of p1, p2 and p3?

Create a system of equations in 3 variable, and solve it using matrix methods.


Mar 19, 2015

Is the desire to pursue math starting from algebra all over again overkill?

I majored in math. I think starting over, for you, is a great idea. You realize you breezed through as a youngster, and now you're more serious. Going back and doing it right will be, I think, a richly rewarding expansion of your mind.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.

-- TS Elliot

Mar 20, 2015

What would you do if you were trapped in a 20×20-foot locked room with an unconscious lion if you had a laptop and WiFi, both of you had fresh water, and the lion is about to awake?

After using the wifi to post a plea for help, if there is a charger, I would chew through the insulation of of the wires. If possible, I would get two leads going directly to the wall socket, insulation removed at end. I would make a puddle with the water, putting the first lead in the puddle.

The other lead i would hold in my hand, perhaps with a wet t-shirt, to use as an electric weapon.

(You didn't mention a window. If present I'd throw the laptop through then jump out).


Mar 22, 2015

What did Gödel prove wrong with Principia Mathamatica?

He didn't prove Principia wrong, he proved the authors (Russell and Whitehead) wrong. To attempt it.

That is, to write down a finite number of axioms from which number theory can be derived.

Godel proved that no such finite set exists. That Principia was essentially a fool's errand. We would always need to assume another axiom.

Godel's proof is constructive, and shows you how to construct this statement which is a necessary axiom.

Once you add it, Godel shows how to come up with a new one, G'.

Create a 'G-machine' that generates G, G', G'', etc ... And yet another G-alpha emerges.

You're never done.


Mar 22, 2015

Why is that a formal system that references itself is inconsistent?

To add to ‎Alon Amit (אלון עמית)‎'s answer, I'll repeat his guess that by "self-reference" you're referring to Godel's proof.

The first point is that any formal system that describes arithmetical theorems is "self-referential." That is, we can use arithmetic to perform "Godel numbering" which turns proofs into theorems. Put differently : proofs are the shuffling around of symbols (given a set of shuffling rules); this shuffling is turned into a numeric statement.

Thus G can be constructed in the system. G asserts : Shuffle all you want (subject these numbers to these numerical functions) and you won't ever derive me (Arrive at my Gödel number.)

G looks like a huge theorem dealing with sets of prime numbers and lots of other stuff.

Can G be derived?

If so - whoops. G says it can't (no amount of shuffling yields me.). We just proved sonwthing that's false. Mathematics collapses. *

If not - oh. Then G was true to it's word. There is a truth we can never derive.

Thus any axiomatic system capable of supporting arithmetic is either inconsistent (totally useless) or incomplete (better hope this is the case.)

* I've papered over some subtleties here, consistence is defined in a more careful way (see omega-consistent.). I cheated by invoking the notion of 'truth', the interested reader hopefully found my post helpful and interesting enough to pursue these finer points.


Mar 22, 2015

How do I find the sum, and explain how it exists?

It's 401 by the Diophantine Convergence Theorem.


Mar 23, 2015

How do I break vectors into components if I know the magnitude and compass direction?

Dassit. I'm gonna make some noise on the Quora TP FB page about student's posting homework assignments. The picture is like lazy sauce on lazy pie.


Mar 23, 2015

Is it okay to tell a smart woman that she is not your ideal (only 80-90% of an ideal), but you want to marry her?

It's perfectly OK. So is smacking yourself in the face with a frozen trout.

Neither is advisable, however.


Mar 23, 2015

Are prime numbers related to factorials?

Loosely. The strongest connection I can think of is the ancient proof that there are infinitely many primes.

Proof by contradiction. Suppose there are a finite number of primes. Then there is a largest prime, P_max.

Consider Z = P_max ! + 1

If Z is prime, Z>P_max, contradiction, QED.

If Z is composite, then it has at least one prime factor F < Z.

F cannot <= P_max (proof left to reader : F will not evenly divide
P_max ! + 1 )

Hence F > P_max. Again contradiction, QED.


Mar 24, 2015

I am a student in Ontario in grade 10 and I'm really interested in mathematics. Is there anything besides school and competitions which are mathematically interesting?

The American Mathematical Monthly gives a set of 5 or so problems each month. Some of them have no known solution; others do.

If you solve one and send them the solution, they will list your name in a later issue.

If your solution is the most elegant and well presented (or is the only known solution), they will publish it.

You can try them alone, or form a team.


Mar 24, 2015

What was C++ originally made for?

Operating systems with graphical user interfaces.

Originally, C was the language of choice for operating systems because it's almost as fast as writing in pure machine code. Unix was written in C.

At the same time that GUI's were catching on (1984-1989ish), the benefits of Object Oriented Programming were becoming clear. This is largely due to the Skeuomorphic nature of GUI's; entities in the system (folders, applications, clocks, etc) mapped to images of real life objects. This is the basic nub of OOP - that the world is made of objects, and the program simulates a part of the world.

So along comes C++ trying to be both Object Oriented and fast at the same time. These two goals were at odds with each other, and C++ is a collection of compromises.

Personally, I think in its effort to be two different things it became an unwieldy monster of inscrutable complexity.


Mar 25, 2015

How is minus(-) times minus(-) a plus(+)?

The real answer is "it's defined that way", which no student finds too illuminating.

Here's a visualization that I found the most helpful.

Imagine a movie camera and record a speed boat moving at 10 MPH. Play it back at double speed, and you see a speed-boat moving at 20 MPH. Run the video backwards and you see a speed boat moving at -10 MPH (same speed, just backward.).

So the film speed x the boat speed = the speed you see.

Ok, have your friend get in the boat and go backwards at -10 MPH.

Film him. Now play the film backwards. You'll see the boat going forward normally at 10 MPH.

This illustrates that -1 x -10 = 10.


Mar 27, 2015

If there is 60% chance of rain on Monday and 70% chance on Tuesday, what is the probability that it will rain on either day, assuming the events are independent?

Jerry Hicks gave a good answer. There is a trick we can use to simplify the problem both conceptually and computationally (Jerry's technique gets harder as the number of days goes up from 2.)

Calculate the chance of it NOT raining both Monday and Tuesday.

So replace Monday's probability, pm, with 1-pm. Same for tues.

Now you have only situation to calculate - no rain Monday AND no rain tues.

pm*pt chance of no rain.

So 1-pm*pt chance of rain,

Note this works for any number of days.

*WARNING : Unnecessary calculus note ahead. You can safely stop now.

Suppose the probability is the same every day.

Then we have P_rain = (1 - P_day/n)^n.

In calculus we learn this converges quickly to e^(-P_day). This bout saves lots of number crunching and is a pivotal bridge from probability into calculus (which is much of statistics.)


Mar 27, 2015

How do you calm down an irate "feminist"?

You got kind of beat up in the other answers. Yeah.

I suggest looking inward to find the core assumptions/beliefs/inclinations behind it.

What is a feminist to you? Are they all the same? Are they even similar?

Why are they irate? At you, something you said? All of them? At the same time for the same reason?

On the face of it, your question is a bit like "What is the best gift for a Methodist?"

There is no sensible answer, but the act of asking might reveal something about yourself, should you be inclined to reflect on it honestly.


Mar 27, 2015

My pupils (10 years old) know the value of "0.01" in "base four". What percentage of scientists know the answer?

Scientists aren't smart because they know things.

They are smart because they can deduce things, invent useful abstractions, and ask important questions.

I would guess your typical scientist has a less than average memory.

Incidentally, in my opinion making 10 year olds calculate in base 4 does them a disservice. This information is out of context at this point in their education.

Keep your eye on the pedagogical big picture and you increase the chance of their becoming a scientist.


Mar 28, 2015

With the benefit of hindsight, should America have invaded Iraq in 2003? Why or why not?

America was deeply split on this war.

I think, in hindsight, even Bush secretly regrets it.

It's quite plausible that W Bush was deliberately set up. That the neocons -- Cheney and Rumsfeld - knew full well that Hussein had no WMD's nor links to Al Qaeda. That intelligence was cherry picked from unreliable sources; if not outright fabricated. Cheney and Rumsfeld knew the lie would be uncovered, and that it would attach itself to Bush' legacy.

Why? The Neocons have a long-term agenda. We can see the world's oil supply being depleted as oil is getting harder to find.

If the dire predictions of Peak Oil turn out to be true, there will be famine and collapse of industrial powers.

The Neocons want heavy American presence and influence over oil-producing countries in the Middle East.

Kuwait is already in the US' pocket. Saudi Arabia was spooked by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, so allowed US military to be deployed within their border. Iraq's government has been toppled, and the country left on the brink of civil war.

All this makes it easier to America secure their oil supply in the coming years, as prices climb and China especially contests us for Arab oil.

Next up, Iran.

This was no mistake. It was imperialism at its ugliest.

Mission Accomplished.


Mar 29, 2015

I’m a 26 year old female who is 5′4″. I look nearly 10 years younger than my age. People always instruct me on what to do, or they are too protective of me. I want to be seen as an adult. Why don't people take me seriously?

I doubt it's your height, nor your gender. Margaret Thatcher, dubbed by the Soviets to be "the iron lady", was just an inch taller than you :


You're probably giving off physical signals of submissiveness or helplessness. Much of our communication is non-verbal; the first popular book on the subject is The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal: Desmond Morris: 9780385334303: Amazon.com: Books. This may be worth a read.

Humans aren't evolved very far past their ancestral roots as more primitive Simians, vying for dominance and communicating non-verbally. There are lots of ways to show others that you are strong, self possessed, and not willing to be dominated :


Two boxers "square off". Look carefully. There is no anger on their faces. The expression is slack. The head is held not up, not down, but level. Eye contact is made and not broken. And they are less than an inch apart.

This is body-language for "Back the fuck up before I hit you."

OK, so you don't want to get into fights. But there is much to be gleaned from this.

A slack expression and unwavering gaze (from a more polite distance) transmits strength.

Watch the rest of your body. Avoid the 'cross' which is a defensive gesture,


You're covering yourself. You're afraid.

Open up those arms -


The pitch of your voice can be a big factor. We are instinctively wired to associate a low pitch with strength. Margaret Thatcher actually took voice lessons to do this. I'm not saying sound like Isaac Hayes, but try dropping an octave.

Avoid "grooming gestures." These are signs of deference in the Simian world. Don't touch your hair or face.


(This is, however, a great way to flirt.)

Finally, no matter what you do somebody is bound to come along and treat you like a 5 year old. You can display contempt for their disrespect without uttering a syllable :


Mar 29, 2015

Why doesn't 9/9 equal 0.999999...?

As other have said, both.

And I would add you seem to have a creative and inquisitive mind that might take well to mathematics as a course of study.


Mar 30, 2015

Why do some people agree to donate their body organs after they die?

If I have no use whatever for something, anyone is welcome to have it.

Somewhere, there is a homeless man wearing my glasses. He had broken his and I noticed our prescriptions were almost identical. I had an old pair which I gave to him.

Why should a pair of glasses sit in a dusty drawer, of no use to anyone, rather than on a man's face so he can see?

When I'm dead, I will have no further use for my body. I hope part of it becomes of use to somebody, anybody.


Mar 31, 2015

Who is Joe Biden? Why have I never heard his name if he is Vice President of the United States? I live in Austria.

He's got this sort of microphone Tourette's where he blurts out insensitive or embarrassing things.

Presumably the Obama administration keeps him in the basement (metaphorically) to avoid such gaffes.

Interestingly, there is little talk of his Democratic nomination for 2016 (the usual course for VP's.). The early buzz is Hillary and ... Who? Elizabeth Warren?


Apr 7, 2015

Which is the largest number: 7631, 3921, or 9341?

As Jean Bénichou makes clear, lots of huge exponents are usually a hint to take logs everywhere.


Apr 9, 2015

Should food stamp recipients be barred from purchasing seafood and chips?

It's just nuts.

Seafood (frozen) can be a very nutritious and inexpensive staple.

(A meal of haddock, rice and veggies can be made for about 2 dollars.)

Steak (of any edible cut) is really too expensive for people on a SNAP-sized budget. I doubt there is any significant purchase of steak by honest SNAP recipients.

Which brings us to the dishonest ones. They sell goods obtained through SNAP, or worse - purchase nothing and split the take with an unscrupulous market.

While higher priced items make such illegal uses slightly more convenient (a steak is more managable than 10 boxes of spaghetti), banning them won't even put a dent in fraud.

So seafood should be *encouraged* - it's a good healthy value. Our fisherman will also thank you - they have families to feed too. Steak's high price will take care of itself.

And fraud is basically impossible to stop, so we just have to live with it.

Which brings us to snack foods like chips. With a balanced meal, some extra salt, fat, or sugar can be healthy.

People should be discouraged from spending lots of sugary cereals and processed food. SNAP recipients should even have access to a guide to help them eat healthy within budget.

But if we try to enforce a healthy diet through regulation, we will bury the system in bureaucracy, mistakes will be made, and formerly honest recipients will start to cheat to circumvent the regulations.

Massive effort, ineffective outcome, increase in fraud.

Nobody wins. Just feed those in need and accept that a minority will make bad choices.


Apr 9, 2015

Why is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial a federal trial?

In addition to other answers, this trial is kind of tricky. The prosecution needs the best (read federal) prosecutors.

It's going to be hard to prove that,

Dzhokar was not essentially hostage to his violent brother.

Dzhokar knew for a fact his back-pack held a bomb (his brother may have duped him or told him it was a smoke bomb or something.)

Once his brother was dead, Dzhokar feared to approach the police with good reason. The police opened fire on an unarmed Dzhokar when he finally surrendered, firing hundreds of rounds in a clear effort to kill him (he fell behind a boat engine, saving his life.). A whily defense will use this to evoke sympathy for the defendant, and distract the jury with the issue of excessive force.


So it makes sense to pull out the big federal guns first. Should they fail to comvict, Dzhokar can still face enough state charges to lock him up for life.


Apr 9, 2015

I've been feeling dizzy after quitting cigarettes cold turkey. It's been 3 weeks and I don't know what to do anymore. What should I do?

Wow - you quit smoking for 3 weeks. You're an inspiration to others.

Persistent dizziness isn't a common side effect of nicotine withdrawal, in my personal experience (and my circle of friends.)

Time to go to the doctor! It could be anything from a mild infection to something more serious. It may be unrelated to your quitting smoking, or your quitting may have unmasked an underlying condition.

So don't light up! But get your head checked, so you can enjoy your freedom from tobacco without being dizzy.

Note : I have no medical credentials.


Apr 9, 2015

Is dissent since 1/20/09 patriotic? Or is it racist?

Dissent may or may not be patriotic. I could dissent from everyone and insist we give the United States to Cuba. Nobody would call that patriotic.

Protection of dissent is always patriotic. The more vile, hateful, and unpatriotic the dissent, the more patriotic the protection.

You can wear a swastika arm-band. I will defend your right to do so, despite my German-Jewish ancestry.

And I'll stand next you with a sign calling you an idiot. Because everyone can voice dissent, and often has a moral obligation to do so.


Apr 9, 2015

What are some things the outside world would be shocked to learn about the United States of America?

For the most part, Americans believe in US exceptionalism.

That America is a breed apart from the rest of the world. Superior. That we need no allies or friends.

We can wage war at our whim.

News from foreign lands is not worthy of our attention.

The outside world is essentially America's unkempt back yard.

Given this persistent delusion, America (and the world) is lucky the US hasn't trampled other nations worse than it has (which is plenty bad enough.)


Apr 10, 2015

What reasonable sounding statement is false?

Every mathematical statement is either true or false, and with enough work we can tell which. (See Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.)

Neanderthals had smaller brains than Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens were the first to tame fire.

The spherical shape of earth was determined once humans sailed around it. (The ancient Greeks knew it was round by measuring shadows, and correctly calculated the size).

Einstein's e=mc2 is the key to the atomic bomb. (It does give a nice explanation of the source of the energy, but the bomb would have been built anyway assuming that potential energy trapped in the nucleus has been released. None of Einstein's scientific work went into the bomb.)

Horses originated in the Eastern Hemisphere, and were brought to the Americas by Europeans. (They actually originated in the Americas, somehow made it to the Eastern Hemisphere - perhaps across the Bering Strait during an ice age, went extinct in the Americas, and were finally brought back.)

The simplest explanation is usually correct. (This common misstatement of Occam's razor is wrong almost everywhere; the more we learn about physics, biology, weather, and so on, the more complex things turn out to be. Occam's razor simply cautions us not to add unneeded complications.)


Apr 10, 2015

How valid is the supposition that Ayn Rand turned the United States into a greedy, selfish nation?

Bluntly, Ayn Rand was a negligible blip in pop philosophy during the US post war boom.

The roots of the US's (imperfect) embrace of laissez-faire capitalism are to be found in the works of economists and philosophers, not novelists. (Sorry, Randians.) See The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1776), the work of Hume, Friedman, the 'Chicago School', etc.

Unlike Rand's most popular books - you'll find them in the non-fiction aisle.
*Ducks.


Apr 11, 2015

Why men marry bitches?

I think it's a mistake to reframe the word "bitch" as a positive thing, like "assertive." So what if it's gender-specific. So is "sister".

I think "bitch" may be taken as the female equivalent of "bastard", meaning difficult, vindictive, petty, dishonest and lots of bad things. Toxic people, to speak more generally.

And I think you'll find toxic people have a hard time marrying. There is some element of Survivor Bias, where we see a married toxic person and notice it more ... "Huh?!"

But toxic people make those around them feel badly. They inflict their negativity on others.

People tend to avoid marrying them out of a simple desire to avoid conflict, drama, and misery.

An interesting exception is that toxic people do tend to marry each other. They both feed on drama and negativity.

I wouldn't suggest going camping with such a couple.


Apr 11, 2015

What are the ways in which a number can be written as a sum of four numbers?

While there are several mathematically elegant approaches to this problem (it's called the 4-partition problem and touches upon dynamic programming), I would encourage you to avoid them. Never build a clock just to find out what time it is.

Make 4 nested loops that go from 0 to 10. That's 160,000 iterations. Count the number of times the four scores total 21. You'll have the answer in under a second.

Doing it any other way is to fall into the intellectual trap of finding complex answers to easy questions. (Unless, of course, you're just curious or wish to generalize your solution.)


Apr 11, 2015

By not removing troops after South Carolina left the Union, did Lincoln start the Civil War?

This touches on the legality of secession. That is, can South Carolina leave the Union at all?

It's complicated. The short answer is No. The long answer is this comes up from time to time. The constitution provides no mechanism for such a withdrawal.

More importantly, South Carolina was a signatory to the Articles of Confederation (which formed the Union, not the Confederacy, despite the name).

Article XIII states that "the Union shall be perpetual."

So South Carolina can't leave the Union. Meaning Union troops have a right to occupy Fort Sumter. Meaning South Carolina started the war by firing on Fort Sumter.

It's not as clear-cut for states that joined later. Generally legal scholars find that belonging to the Union is permanent. The US Supreme Court upheld in Texas vs. White (1867) (LII / Legal Information Institute) that later states are bound in perpetuity as outlined in the Articles of Confederation.

But three judges did dissent from this view.

So legally, South Carolina looks guilty. Morally -- that's a different question. Doesn't our Declaration of Independence uphold that governments exist by consent of the governed? Is it ever fair to impose government on people? Even in the face of a civil rights catastrophe like slavery?

I don't know. But I don't feel bad about invading an area, occupying it, freeing their slaves and giving them full rights as citizens. Whether it be South Carolina or some foreign country.


Apr 11, 2015

U.S. Civil War: Who started the Civil War?

To add to the other good answers here, the outbreak of the war - literally firing the first shots - was actually rather comical, especially considering how quickly that war turned so ugly.

Seven southern states had declared their secession in 1861, including South Carolina. South Carolina seized all federal property around Charleston, except Fort Sumter :


Well fortified and mostly surrounded by water, this fort wasn't easy to seize.

Federal troops hunkered down for an uneasy stand-off. As resupply ships were dispatched to the fort, the Confederates demanded the fort be evacuated. The union refused.

The south opened fire on the fort at 4:30 AM. This marks the start of the shooting war. Here's the interesting thing : Nobody was hit by cannon fire. As if the South were deliberately trying to avoid casualties; perhaps by firing at predictable times and targets and avoiding powder kegs and such.

This went on for 36 hours and still - not a single person was even injured. The fort could probably have been flattened in that time had the south desired.

Finally, the Union commander - Major Anderson, agreed to evacuate. The rebels stopped firing and agreed to let them go in peace.

Anderson had one condition, though : everybody has to salute the Union flag as it is brought down during a 100-gun salute.

The south (rolling their eyes, no doubt) agreed. A confederate ship came to the fort to deliver their mail.

During the salute, one of the guns set a powder keg ablaze, killing Private Daniel Hough and Private Edward Galloway.

After surviving a 36 hour enemy bombardment, the first two casualties of the war resulted from friendly cannons that were firing blanks.


Apr 11, 2015

What does combinatorics have to do with multiplication? My child's teacher said they learnt multiplication today through combinatorics, so I was curious what that could mean.

There's a number of possibilities, here's one :

How many ways is there to roll two dice (of two different colors, say black and white.)

That is, how many *combinations* are possible of two dice. Multiply the number of individual possibilities together - 6x6 = 36. So problems in combinatorics rely a lot on multiplication.

(Note that I made the dice two different colors so that 3-4 is different than 4-3. This simplifies the calculation to a single multiplication.)


Apr 12, 2015

What are some things statisticians know that others don't?

HERE THAR BE PARADOXES :

Let's play a game. I'll flip a quarter, and see how many times I can get heads to come up. You have to pay me 2^n dollars, where n is the number of heads in a row. (For example, if I get heads twice, you pay 4 dollars. If I get heads 5 times, you owe me 2^5=32 dollars.)

What amount of money do I have to put down prior to the match, to make it a fair game?

A hundred? A thousand? A trillion?

No. There is no amount of money that can compensate you for playing this game.

That is, the 'expected value' doesn't converge. It's infinite. (1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 ...)

THE PERFECT CRIME IS EASY.

Suppose you don't like Jello. For whatever reason. Their CEO stole your girlfriend, whatever.

Don't worry. I got ... Friends. They fix problems. Let's call 'em fixers.

We'll run a big study. Feed Jello to 100,000 people. We're looking for a causal connection to any health disorder. Diabetes, testicular cancer, pscizophrenia. Anything. As long as Jello looks bad.

We use a confidence interval of 99%. Testing for 100 different disorders, by random chance one will slip through. Spontaneous decapitation, say.

Toss out the other 99 calculations. Who needs to know? It's not like you're messing with the data. Run the headline : Massive new study links Jello to Spontaneous Decapitation with 99% confidence.

The papers run with it. Wow. Jello is scary. Is there a lawyer in the house?

Of course, other researchers won't be able to reproduce the results. *yawn*. Page 6 news.

Nice doin' business with ya. Call me any time. Smaller bills, next time though.


Apr 12, 2015

Why are people on Quora so helpful and supportive unlike many other social networks?

It started as an exclusive site centered in Silicon Valley. The Valley has a culture of volunteerism, civility and helping.

It grew more slowly than Facebook and Twitter, which both exploded so fast the original culture was overwhelmed. Quora ramped up more gradually, so its original positive culture wasn't stampeded by new users. Rather, as new people joined, they saw a culture of civility and generosity, and responded in kind.

Real names. Everything said here can be easily googled by a potential investor, business partner, employer or other professional connection. So people tend to put their best foot forward.


I hope you find my modest speculations of some value.


Apr 13, 2015

What do people think about this logo from Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign?

Edit: OMG, below was written when I thought this was the work of an amateur graphic designer. I had no idea this is her actual logo. I am pretty aghast - talk about stumbling out of the gate ...

I like it, but not as a political logo. I would ditch it as a good first attempt and go back to the drawing board.

It would make, by the way, a great sign to a hospital.

To deconstruct my firm dislike:

It's too simple, too sterile, too geometric. (Think swastika.) There's no nuance, no life (think Canada's maple leaf).

The arrow is both red and pointing to the right. Satirists will have a field day, joking that the logo points voters away from Hillary into the Republican camp.

A GOP candidate need only put up her logo to the left of his and... Burn!

But don't take it too hard. It really is a damn good hospital sign.

EDIT #2 : The New Yorker wasted no time in proving my point :


Apr 13, 2015

Do girls become cold and rude when I don't take the conversation to the next level or make an effort to get to know them?

I'd guess there's a couple of things going on. Firstly, when a group is newly formed everybody tends to be friendlier and eager to at least make everyone's acquaintance. Let's call this the "Opening Day" effect.

Then there is the cooling off as the group's attention refocuses on work to be done. "The Big Chill."

Then the groups tends to partition itself into subgroups, who become more strongly connected to each other, but distanced from outsiders. We can call this "Galaxy Formation."

Things tend to more-or-less stabilize at this point. People may change groups, or groups may split, but not usually. Call this "Steady State."

This is where your class is now. And it looks like you got left out of all the groups; you're a "Rogue Star." Everyone seems cold and distant.

I don't know why, but I have a theory. You don't mention talking to males. You don't seem interested in getting to know them. You didn't get included in any of their groups.

Did you only say hello to women? Only make eye contact with women? Only sit next to women?

Because women are highly attuned to this sort of thing (and will discuss it in their sub-group.) "That dude is just mackin' on every girl he sees."

You may be able to salvage the situation by getting into orbit with some bros.


Apr 13, 2015

Using just your mind, what is the ratio of the number of all perfect squares to all perfect cubes for numbers up to 1 billion?

# squares up to 1 billion = # integers up to sqrt(10^9) = 3.2 * sqrt(10^8) = 32,000.

similarly, # cubes = # integers up to 1,000.

The ratio is exactly the square root of 10.

Judging by other answers, looks like i slipped a digit. Ratio = 10*sqrt(10).


Apr 13, 2015

If two players each roll two pairs of dice and the higher sum wins, why should each person win about half the time?

By symmetry. The expected winnings don't change if the players switch sides.

Thus P_win = 1 - P_win, P_win=1/2 .


Apr 13, 2015

If you are planning to support the Democratic nominee for President in 2016 no matter what, who would you prefer to see as the Republican nominee?

From a Game Theoretic perspective, Sarah Palin. Hillary would shred her in the debates and the Republicans would lose.

Playing things straight, Jeb Bush strikes me as the brightest, most vigorous likely nominee.


Apr 14, 2015

Can two different non piecewise functions be the same on an interval and different elsewhere?

|x| = x for x >= 0 .


Apr 14, 2015

How do great theoretical physicists create equations?

An interesting question.

Physicists don't set out to create equations, per se. Equations are the precise articulation of relations between entities. That last sentence is a bit abstract, so let me give an example.

Let's say we figure out a way to measure how hard you press on something. Force. Some kind of spring device would probably do the trick, but whatever - we find a way to measure it.

We also come up with a way to measure the speed of an moving object. And its acceleration.

And finally, we build a scale to weigh various objects.

We get curious about how force affects objects. We push on them and they move. And keep moving, for a good long time. If we keep pushing, the object accelerates. We start taking notes.

We notice something. Double the force, and the acceleration doubles.
Double the mass, and the acceleration gets cut in half.

So we think. And think some more. We have 3 entities : Force, Mass and Acceleration. And our measurements indicate :

Force = Mass x Acceleration. *[1]

Nothing magic here; anyone experienced with mathematics would write this formula immediately after a few experiments.

But, no offense, Sir Isaac Newton. It is a great honor to meet you.

So where'd the equation come from? We got a thought in our head about 3 different entities (force, mass and acceleration) and how they are related.

That relation is an equation because science only cares about entities that can be measured by number. *[2]

In this case, the relation was directly suggested by experiment. We'd say that we came to it 'empirically'.

We don't always discover relations through experiment. Einstein suggested a whole bunch of them because they fit together in a way that intuitively felt right and offered an explanation for previously unexplained phenomena.

As opposed to 'empirically', this sort of discovery is called a priori (without experience or prior to experience.) Both contribute to a physicist's thinking.

So we may find relations by measuring, or we may think them up, but these relations still come out as equations.

It is a deep question in philosophy whether these relations really exist in the physical world. Did Einstein discover his relations? Or invent them?

The belief they are discovered is called Platonism. The belief they are invented is called Nominalism. This debate has been going on for over two thousand years and continues.

To summarize, the equations are the language we use to connect measurable things like weight.

The Platonists believe that, if we can connect everything this way perfectly, then we have discovered the blue-print of the cosmos.

The nominalists believe we have reinvented the cosmos within our minds.

Pretty kick ass either way.

1: I'm skimming over gravity here, scales don't measure mass, we have to gravity into account. (A bowling ball on the moon doesn't weigh the same.)

2: Not always by number, per se. There are other precise constructs like complex numbers, matrices, groups and so on.


Apr 14, 2015

Why do only guys compliment my body (I'm a guy) and girls won't say anything?

It's generally a faux pas to comment on the physique of the opposite gender.

You can compliment a woman on her choices, not her body.

"That's a lovely sweater you have on" will get you a smile.

"Nice rack" will get you slapped.


Apr 14, 2015

What is the most American thing ever?

Shoot a gun! America !


Murica! Nah - shoot a bigger gun!


Murica! Still too small, though!


There it is! Shoot a big ole gun! Murica !!!


Apr 15, 2015

Should I tell my spouse I've read a mental health evaluation that enumerates my every complaint about him?

No. Playing amateur physiatrist is not a productive move in a relationship.

And you're almost certainly wrong. You say you have a lot of complaints against him. So you're resentful. You could probably read almost any list of 'symptoms' and think 'Ah hah!'.

This is one reason diagnoses are done by objective professionals.

You may have a psych disorder yourself - who knows?

In any case I'd recommend couple's counseling for the both of you.

And you enter into it without the expectation that it's all your partner's fault. You'll both need to work together and change together.

And if you find yourself saying "Why should I have to change !? I've already bent over backwards and this person is HOPELESS" - you'll find yourself alone in your self-assessment of perfection,

And eventually just alone.

If he refuses counseling or threatens your safety then I would just leave.


Apr 15, 2015

What should Americans be more alarmed about?

The news media has abandoned their post in our democracy.

Once upon a time, they went into war zones and objectively reported on what was going on :


The day's operation burned down 150 houses, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one marine and netted these four prisoners. Four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English ... to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor - it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side. -- Morley Safer, Cam Ne, Vietnam. 1965.



Once upon a time, they did investigative journalism. Like detectives, they would hunt down wrong-doing. No matter where the trail led.


Reporters who managed to uncover criminal behavior in our government were considered heroes. The stuff of movies. With Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.



Film All The President's Men. Nominated for five academy awards. Won two.


Since then, the entire news media has fallen under the control of a handful of corporations. From 1983 until now, 50 independent media companies have merged into just six.

These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America


The consolidated news media keeps the country distracted with the touch-point issues of race, violence, and sex. If they can manage all three in one story, they've got a year's worth of material :


This keeps everyone distracted from the elephants in the room, like :

Why do we still have a cold war defense budget?

Can I be arrested without charges being revealed to me, and without a lawyer to represent me ?

When are the fossil fuels going to be exhausted? What's our plan there?

Our food crops have DNA that was not produced by nature. How might this affect our ecosystem?

After 2008, Iceland threw a bunch of bankers in jail. Aside from Madoff, why have no similar criminal charges been brought in the US?


If this gets any worse, we're going to have the CIA reporting the news. Oh, too late. The CIA has admitted to having paid operatives in the news media.

House Intelligence Committee Hearing, 1975

The framers of the constitution understood the importance a vigorous free press for a democracy to function.

Ours is gone.


Apr 15, 2015

With most of World War 2 survivors dying, are we starting to see a world more open to conflict and war?

I don't think so.

Even though the WWII veterans are passing on, film bears eternal witness to this global disaster.

We can watch a bizarre cult of personality take over a peaceful democracy, bulldozers moving piles of bodies, cities collapsing in flame.

And of course, we still carry the ultimate scars from this war - our nuclear arsenals - which render "total war" a Mass Extinction Event.


Apr 15, 2015

If Hitler had died in June 1940, would history have considered him a military and political genius?

June, 1940? No - the invasion of Poland set Europe on fire and Germany's eventual fall was inevitable. Had Hitler dropped dead in June 1940, Nazi Germany was in possession of Europe from France to Poland but at war with the UK.

America would probably have remained neutral (while sneakily resupplying the UK), and the Soviet/German border would have remained quiet.

So the war with the UK would drag on, meanwhile Germany was running out of oil.

The US would probably have gone on to build the atomic bomb, after seeing so many democracies toppled and German scientists splitting the atom in 1938.

Once built, it seems likely the US would have given a few to the UK to drop on Germany. So Germany would be forced to surrender after losing a few cities.

If we go back, prior to the invasion of Poland, and posit that Hitler died in August, 1939, he would be remembered as a political genius who got himself dictatorial powers and used them to restore Germany to her former glory through persuasion, intimidation, brinksmanship and fear-mongering.

I doubt he'd have many admirers, but his string of political achievements up to this point was impressive.

(I agree with Boris Polania that he was never a military genius. Some of his generals were. Good thing Hitler kept insisting on micromanaging them.)


Apr 17, 2015

What is the biggest barrier to Hillary Clinton in winning the 2016 US presidential election?

The broadly (no pun intended!) held presumption that she will win the Democratic Nomination and even the Presidency itself.

This will do a number of bad things for her :

Donors won't donate.

Volunteers won't bother.

Voters will sit this one out.

The press won't give her a 'honeymoon' before they go on the attack.

Other candidates in both parties will target her specifically - people won't just run, they will run *against her*. She'll come under fire from all directions.


The other big problem for her is that the economy is still sputtering after 8 years. She's looked upon almost like an incumbent president; a natural extension of the current administration.

7 years of economic anemia has put voters in an anti-incumbent mood.


Apr 17, 2015

What properties does the last digit of any number system have?

For an integer X written in base N, with last digit D:

If D=0 then N divides (without remainder) X.

If D divides N then D divides X. For example, in base 10, 79575 is divisible by 5.

If and only if N-1 divides the sum of the digits then N-1 divides X,


Apr 17, 2015

Why are most heartbreak stories written by women?

Tune to any country music channel to a counter-example to your assumption that most heart-break songs are written by women. (Also, the blues.)

Reminds me of an old joke : What happens when you play country music backwards? You get your dog back, you truck back, and your woman back.


Apr 17, 2015

What are the world's worst democratically elected governments in history?


Paul von Hindenburg, president of Germany, 1925-1934.

His presidency bore much in common with the airship named after him.


The simplest way to describe him was : he loved democracy when he got his way.

The German constitution was somewhat similar to the US's: Bills had to be passed by both Parliament and President. But unlike the US, the German president could dissolve the parliament at any time during an 'emergency', per Article 48 (Weimar Constitution) . This would require a new election to repopulate the Parliament.

Hindenburg kept dissolving Parliament as a legislative tactic when Parliament was deadlocked or opposed his agenda.

The first time was in 1930, when there was an impasse over a financial bill.
Hindenburg would dissolve the Parliament three more times by 1932.

This maneuver allowed the President to rule by decree until a new Parliament was elected. And here's the thing : Both the communists and the nazis would vigorously campaign during these re-elections. The communists gained seats and the nazis gained more. Moderates became more slimly represented, as Parliament became more dead-locked between communists and nazis.

By 1932, nazis were the largest party in the Parliament. Although Hindenburg despised Hitler, he appointed Hitler Chancellor as a concession to the nazi's.

In 1933 the Parliament building was burned down (Reichstag fire). Hitler convinced Hindenburg to sign the Enabling Act of 1933, granting absolute power to Hitler to deal with the 'crisis'. Hitler bullied Parliament into signing the bill. ('If you vote against this, and I win - I'm coming after you.)

Germany's democracy collapsed into the abyss and took Europe down with it.


Apr 18, 2015

How is building a 3D model calculus? How does calculus in effect give you X ray vision?

It isn't.

It doesn't.


Apr 19, 2015

My colleagues are always coming up with illogical arguments. They say "Quora sucks; it should be banned." What should I do? Are they right? They also say, “Politics suck,” but don’t know current news.

I can't tell you if they are right, but you mention they always come up with illogical arguments, and give some examples of their being misinformed (like judging a movie by its box-office earnings.)

To which I can only offer an adage which I have found both true and useful :

"When you find yourself arguing with an idiot, the idiot is doing the same thing."

Just walk away. I only argue with people who are informed and rational.

This way the argument can inform both sides and sharpen their view, even if neither side changes the opinion.

And "losing" such an argument is the greatest prize of all; the other person has given you such a well-grounded argument that you change your thinking. You actually won.


Apr 19, 2015

Question That Contains Assumptions: As a citizen of the USA, do you feel embarrassed to be called an American citizen, given the fact that the USA has killed, pillaged and destroyed more nations/people on earth than any other country?

Many Americans, if not most, are tired of "the American century" and being the police force to the world (and well aware our government hasn't always wielded this power benevolently.)

These Americans would like to able to scale back our military presence to our own shores and "stand down" from our permanent state of war.

Half the problem, as Noam Kaiser says, is the rest of the world has yet to step forward and assume the role of global police. When there is a genuine human rights emergency, such as the Kosovo War, the heads of foreign governments play this hand:

Do Nothing. Let the US, Canada and the Brits handle it. We risk nothing. If it goes well applaud them. If it goes badly criticize them.

This is actually the politically smart move for a politician, in terms of their individual risk and reward. However, it makes the whole world complicitous in this Pax Americana. The problem being that no one nation is capable enough, or moral enough, to be relied upon to do the right thing at every crisis.

Sometimes, we totally drop the ball as in the Rwandan Genocide. Other times, we engage in Imperialist adventurism under false pretenses, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The day that the governments of the world cry out, in unison, against the American police force and in favor of a viable replacement, the voters of the USA would be ecstatic to pull our forces back and channel our defense budget (40% of global defense spending) to the betterment of life here at home.

No, I'm not ashamed of my country. How about you?


Apr 19, 2015

Despite being a regular Joe, why do so many men keep having an attitude of defiance towards me with staring eyes and deliberate hostile shoulder contacts on the sidewalk?

You may have the misfortune of bearing a likeness to a local trouble-maker.

He likely is a native French speaker, so you can test this theory by speaking English loudly to your girlfriend during one of these encounters. (I assume your English has an American, British or Indian accent.)


Apr 19, 2015

What would make a better campaign logo for Hillary Clinton?

Just moving this picture by Tomiwa Allan Ogunmodede out from his comment thread so folks can see it.

So far he is our best and only contributor. C'mon Quora, anybody else?


Apr 19, 2015

What are your thoughts about the new Apple Watch?

Apple has a way of releasing products that look totally unviable, which go on to create their own market and conquer the world.

However, culture must also be ready to make the shift. Apple has many failures (like the Newton) that were rejected by a culture which just wasn't receptive.

From the failure of google glass and the general aversion to Bluetooth headsets, there seems to be cultural opposition to wearable connective technology.

Our body is where we draw the line. For now. We won't wear this stuff.

Thus I predict doom for this device.


Apr 19, 2015

If Hillary Clinton became president, what would Bill Clinton be called?

"First President" would work on a number of levels in this unique case.


Apr 19, 2015

Why does Elon Musk intend to set up a Mars colony instead of making life for us humans on Earth easier?

The human race has long possessed the resources to make every human life safe, sheltered, fed, educated and cared for in illness.

The human race simply lacks the will to do so.

Redirecting the efforts of Musk or anyone else does nothing to solve this central problem.


Apr 20, 2015

In what ways are Christians having their constitutional rights limited by these anti-Christian groups on the American Family Association website?

To add to Paul Dezso deHolczer's excellent answer,

The rights of Christians are not trampled by the separation of church and state (which is propounded by the site you mention, American Family Association.)

The separation of church and state was created to protect Christians and it continues to protect them (and other groups.)

Let's go back in time a bit.

The Puritans (Christian) left England to escape persecution under the King (Christian) and the Church of England (Christian.) So that they could worship in their own way.

The Puritans sought a simpler mode of worship and more literal interpretation of the Bible.

The C of E itself broke off from the Roman Catholic church for reasons you can easily look up.

Okay, fast forward to 1776. The separation of church and state was largely the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They added the separation of church and state in Amendment 1 to the constitution, not to disavow the faithful, but to protect them.

The state has no right to get between you and God. Or to tell you what God demands, who he/she/it/they is, or if it exists at all. That is up to you.

So you're Christian. Do you believe divorce is an abomination? What if the husband is an alcoholic adulterer? Christians differ on this issue.

Do you believe that women should be given an equal role in the church, and can lead worship services? Christians differ on this.

As they differ on gay rights, abortion rights, and a hundred other questions about how to interpret scripture.

Odds are, if we had a Christian government - your particular interpretation of the Bible would run afoul of the government's, and your faith would be illegal. Civil wars may even erupt.

In fact, this is exactly what happens throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.

The separation of church and state protects Christians. It also happens to protect Jews, Muslims, Pagans, Agnostics and Atheists.

If you look at the world, today and in the past, from the Taliban to the Salem Witch Trials - you will see that you do not want to live in a theocracy.

Trust me on that one.


Apr 21, 2015

What are some of the best responses to "sell me this pen/pencil" in a job interview?

This ... Is a lucky pen! (Cup/pencil/etc ...). It got me a job!

Buy it and it just might bring you similar good fortune.


Apr 22, 2015

If the comet that caused the extinction of dinosaurs were to have instead missed earth, would it be dinosaurs building the Hubble telescope, inventing new technology, and contemplating their place in the universe, rather than humans?

No.

The dinosaurs evolved as the perfect animals for a stable climate.

They dominated the earth for 135 million years, from the Jurassic through the Cretacious eras (200M to 65 M years ago).

They were a very diverse group of creatures, but broadly speaking we can say this about them :

The bigger the better. If you were too big to kill, and if you were happy to eat leaves or fast enough to kill meat - you had it made.

Their brains were small. These creatures did not benefit from intelligence, being grazers, scavengers or solitary hunters. They didn't need tools or cooperation. (Pack-hunting did occur but wasn't nearly as common.)

They were not adaptable. A Mass Exinction Event would take them all out in one blow (actually they evolved into modern birds, taking a seat far lower on the food chain.)


The meteor impact of 65 million years ago set the atmosphere on fire briefly. Only creatures underground or under water survived.

In the long 'winter' that ensued, being big was a problem. You need lots of food. Fresh water. A big appetite meant death in a time of scarcity.

Being dumb was also a problem. The old ways don't work - the world has changed. Planning, cooperation (pack hunting), building of shelters and other aspects of intelligence became evolutionary pay-dirt.

It was only 2M-250K years ago (we're still very unsure) that Homo sapiens emerged with a huge brain that begat tool-making, climate adaptation, tribalism, agriculture etc etc that enabled man to take dominion of the earth.

Had the meteor missed us, it probably would have simply extended the reign of dinosaurs to present day. So they'd dominate for 200 million years instead of 135 million.

No Internet. Just T. rex's.


Apr 22, 2015

How can I build mathematical maturity? What specific textbooks and exercise can I go over and over until I am able to independently learn math?

The beauty (and difficulty) of mathematics is that it cannot be learned through repetition and memorization.

You can learn to do calculations but you will never be 'mature' in the sense of having a sense of elegance, and being able to derive your own solutions from first principles.

I would set as a goal two things :

To be able to solve problems where the approach to take is non obvious. The Putman Competition is a good source of such problems.

Of course you're going to need some breadth of study. Just make sure you work through the problems before examining the solutions. Especially focus on developing a sense of elegance; was your solution as simple as possible; was it generalizable to a broader set of problems? Try to describe it in words - the harder this is to do the less elegant your solution likely is.

Above all, prove, do not calculate. Mathematics is about proofs. Calculations are a 'triviality' (usually) and often left out of the final proof as being tedious and unimportant to the structure of the proof.

Having an experienced mathematician/math professor critique your work and direct your study will be helpful.


Apr 26, 2015

Have any great mathematicians here done this during their school times...?

Hahaha - I recognize that sort of thing.

I'm not a great mathematician by any stretch but did fare well in the Putnam Exam, so I suppose I have a modicum of mathematical talent.

And I have given apparently silly answers to things because my perspective doesn't assume much,

For example,

What do these three numbers have in common? "They are all written on the blackboard."

If we turn this knob to the right four units, what will it read? "Do you mean the top or the bottom moves right? Please specify clockwise or counter."

What X-Y point lies 5 units up and to the right of the origin? "The question is ambiguous; the x/y dimensions have positive and negative directions only. The usual left/right/up/down are entirely arbitrary, unnecessary and subject to change.

And the all time big one. It was in my math SATS. The only one I got "wrong". Q: We have a bucket with 5 red balls, 5 white, and 5 yellow. What is the least amount of balls we need to take to be certain we have 2 of each color. My answer : 6 There is a somewhat unlikely chance you get it right on the first six. In this case, you look at them and know you have two of each color. So this is the minimal circumstance: Their answer was 12, the worst case : 5+5+2. That allows you to be certain BEFOREHAND (or without looking). The question did not state that last part.


Cost me an 800 on the SATs. As far as I know the error was never acknowledged or corrected, since most people made the 'natural' extra assumption.


Apr 27, 2015

Do you ever get in the mindset as a developer where you simply don't want to think and you end up sitting on a task for way too long? Are there practical techniques to combat that alongside with pure discipline?

Yes : stop.

Coding takes sharp mental acuity and is not a game of minutes, but of functionality. If you're stuck, stop what you're doing and walk away (if posssible) or do some mindless busy work.

This recharges your mental batteries. (The industrial corporate model of 5 8-hour work days in a cubicle is antithetical to this, but don't get me started.)


Apr 27, 2015

Would most straight men date a trans woman?

On the whole, no. Not a pretty answer but true.

Being born male usually leaves traces of unmistakable male attributes; large hands, narrow hips, more prominent jaw. There are, of course exceptions. There are also men particularly attracted to these traits in a woman.

I doubt a transgender woman has any trouble finding a date or a partner.


Apr 28, 2015

Would I get sued if I named an internet company GoMama?

GoDaddy is almost certainly a registered trademark.

This legally prevents you from using their name - or a close variation - if there is a reasonable chance of confusing your company with the trademark holders.

If you made cat food you'd be fine. But if you're selling the same time of service and using a close name you'll hear from their lawyers quickly and probably lose in court.


Apr 29, 2015

How often should I practice maths on Khan Academy if I really enjoy it?

If you enjoy it, do it whenever you can.

And whenever you can't. Streal time from other subjects. Miss deadlines.

You like it. Do it more than is reasonable.


May 1, 2015

Why do many people love Steve Jobs more than Bill Gates, even though Gates is generally acknowledged to be a nicer person?

To add a bit to Jonathan Rotenberg's excellent (nay, best IMO) answer:

Jonathan points to the period leading up to 1996 (pre Job's resurrection of Apple) as Microsoft's age of Tyranny over end-users. And I think that’s true.

And Jonathan righty points out that Microsoft's goal was market domination. By making incremental improvements over competitor's products.

But also in other, sometimes more critical ways. Microsoft engaged in unethical and illegal anti-competitive practices which *suppressed* innovation.

If you build a better, cheaper web browser - everyone benefits. If you have one that's just okay, bolt it as a standard part to your operating system and bury the cost in the whole system, competitors (Netscape) die.

The consumer is hurt by this, as no competitor drives the product to better performance.

The Developer is also hurt by this (a point Jonathan didn't mention but I will.)
Unlike open source browsers, IE didn't publish known bugs. Without source as well, it was a black box. All you could do was poke it with a stick to see how it responded.

Microsoft also made the Developer's life hell by breaking standards ("embrace, then extend" was their euphemism for it.).

They'd add their own tags to HTML. They'd introduce propriety and inferior technologies like VBScript, ActiveX, .NET.

Look at any web page's markup and you can still see debris from the browser wars.

Ok, enough about browsers. The development environment was expensive. And total crap.

The "Microsoft Foundation Classes" had many bugs known to Microsoft, but MS never published them. (As they've never done for any product.). So each developer had to fall into every hole for themselves.

Absolutely appalling bugs just didn't get fixed for years. (Pre compiled headers in C++ didn't alway *work*.)

The OS got more bloated and buggier, slowing the developer down at every turn.

So the developer grimly slogs through all this and makes a product, and wants to start a company. MS was notorious for crushing such companies in the hatchling stage by "pre-announcing" functionality which was actually years off if it came at all. But killed the little company's chance to get investors.

By '96, many developers actively hated Microsoft. I believe it was this frustration that threw the Web Server market to Linux.

So Microsoft's villainy extended to developers as well as users, and were not always based on small product improvents but rather unethical and illegal suppression of competition. (I forgot to mention vendor lock-in but you get the idea.)

It wasnt until Google and Apple became so powerful that open source web browsers hit the mainstream. That Office got a free, cloud-based run for its money with Google Docs.

Microsoft's tactics brought only short-term gain. They are losing (or have lost) mind- and market- share on every front : the office, the web, mobile - you name it.

Like a T-Rex struggling to trample the agile little mammals at its feet; it can only watch the world evolving from a position of irrelevance.

Apple and Google build the platforms - mobile and tablet. Linux powers the back-end of the world. Little companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pop out of nowhere and conquer the world.

Apple's ITunes pulls the music industry out from under them as a result of Job's personal and relentless persuasion.

So. Like the T-Rex, Microsoft got big and hurt things. It hurt users, developers, start-ups. Thankfully, a meteor approaches.

A final change of topic : Gate's philanthropy. I'm glad he's giving the money to good causes.

But look at the broader picture. The most important issues plaguing humanity ; disease, thirst, hunger.

Isn't there something centrally wrong with a world which ignores these atrocities to such an extent that a single person must address them (according to his whim.). Isn't there something wrong when wealth concentrates to such a degree that a single person *can* address them? With moneys obtained by anticompetitive practices?

Forget our laptops - why the hell are people starving in the first place? Is our plan to feed the world's children ... Sit back and hope a guy like Gates does the right thing ?


May 2, 2015

My ex-husband has never forgiven me for cheating on him. He caused me to cheat. How do I make him see this?

He has not forgiven you for the simple reason that you have not asked forgiveness. Instead you blame him.

You have to own your behavior before you - or anyone else - can move past it. He is not stuck. You are.


May 2, 2015

What are the key traits of mentally strong people?

I am about to rant. And rave. I will be all over the place and will attack culture, psychiatry, society, etc. It'll be a blood bath. But I'll mean every word and I hope this post rewards the patient reader.

A: Choice. That's it. The one and only trait. The mentally strong person chooses.

They choose what occupies their thoughts and feelings. They choose their battles. They choose their values.

They choose what matters.

People used to know this. It was a natural reaction to a hard world of failed crops, feudal wars, smallpox. They conserved emotional energy. Minor conflicts were written off as "a few blows between Romans." The flaws of your parents were dismissed as a matter of love and honor. You'd no more discuss these flaws than show naked pictures of your mom.

We were tough. Toughest damn thing on earth. Grabbed a flaming branch and took it home and softened meat with it. Lions needed protection from us. We had no 'natural habitat.' We lived wherever the fuck we wanted.

Then came the 20th century. Surgeons got good at cutting people open and fixing them. But one of them ... Well.

I often say : If I had a gun, 2 bullets, and found myself with Stalin, Mussolini, and Freud ... I'd shoot Freud twice.

I mean it. Freud did to the human race what no ice age or virus could do. He planted the essential seed of weakness.

He told us we must not choose. That every concern, every slight, must be considered and discussed. Else we're repressing. And the fluid pressure builds and builds till we explode.

We've got to talk. About your parents. About your grievances. Sit down, lay back, this won't be quick.

Meanwhile, between sessions, if somebody bothers you - let it out! Somebody cut in front of you in line? You tap their shoulder and confront them right there. Soup cold? Send it back. You didn't dirty that spoon? Don't wash it.

Freud killed choice. Created several generations of fragile narcissists, all nerve endings. We'd never get through another ice age like this.

But you can choose. To shoot Freud twice and be happy come what may.


May 4, 2015

What's the difference between being immature/childish and just having fun?

The approval of the person using the label.

"Immature" is code for "I don't like what you're doing", "fun" is code for "I like what you're doing."

Such language is used to lend weight to a personal preference by wrapping it in some larger notion of maturity - that someone is progressing in life in a 'normal' or 'acceptable' way. Which also is subjective.


May 4, 2015

If all-out nuclear war started right now between the USA and Russia, what would it feel like on a far away, unaffected place on Earth?

Lonely, then dark, then snowy, then dead.

It's likely that if the US and Russia detonated their entire nuclear arsenal,'the most remote place on earth would experience, in roughly this order :

Loss of all contact with the outside world. Communication networks would go down first from the E-M pulse which would fry computer chips, and then loss of the power grid.

The sky would fill with black clouds of dust and debris swept into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Rain and snow would fall of varying degrees of radioactivity.

Global temperatures would plummet as the clouds block out the sunlight.


While it's hard to say for sure, it seems quite possible that the human race would become extinct.


May 4, 2015

Question that contains assumptions: Why are Native Americans going extinct?

I'll swim upstream against the other answers here, which argue against the assumption of extinction.

The people native to the Americas did not survive contact with European settlers.

First, diseases like smallpox wiped out a majority of their population and destabilized their societies.

Their food supply was disrupted as Europeans hunted species like Bison to near-extinction, dammed rivers, cut down trees, and generally disrupted the environment.

The once prosperous and numerous indigenous people were now weak in both number and necessities like food.

European powers exploited this weakness and accelerated their demise by depriving them of ever more resources and living space until only some 'reservations' remained.

Native American lineage is now mostly commingled with that of Europeans.


May 4, 2015

I've heard of some pseudoscience made up by Nazi Germany to explain why the Aryan race was better than any other race. What was said, and what was believed by the German citizens?

There were a whole spectrum of beliefs, in increasing order of whackiness :

The 'Aryan Race', physically distinct by blonde hair, blue eyes, and square jaw, were superior to other humans in every way. Physically stronger, braver, more noble, and the sole bearers of creative genius. Aryans alone created culture; other races were mere 'bearers' (or corrupters) of it.

Getting crazier, this part was less public and mostly reserved for the SS. The 'Aryans' were descended from a lost race of superhumans (one theory has them going down with Atlantis.). These original Aryans possessed telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance.

These super powers were lost by cross-breeding with inferior races.

These powers could be regained by inbreeding 'Aryan' bloodlines. The SS provided for such a breeding ground.

Jews were the antithesis of the Aryans; a natural enemy whose primary instinct was the eradication of the 'Aryan' race.

Interestingly, the Nazis had to reject a great deal of scientific and cultural progress in order to cling to this fantasy.

Einstein : wrong. A clever Jewish trick to confuse scientists.

Art : Had to be representational. Picasso was chaotic noise. Preferably it existed to romanticize the State.

Architecture : Big, flashy, endeavoring to overwhelm by sheer size (much in the style of Ancient Rome.)

Literature : Virtually all of it was banned to silence the multicultural mind-hive of the world.

Had the land-war not extinguished this delusion, it would have gone up in a mushroom cloud in 1945.


May 4, 2015

Did German citizens of Nazi Germany realize how oppressive their government was? Did they defend their government? What was their general attitude?

Funny, Goebbels has the asker eating out of his hands.

Goebbels first mastered public propoganda. The trick, he said, was to create the illusion of controversy.

To keep the public distracted from the government's agenda.

A minority is killed across the country by a racist cop.

But in your living room, you can be arrested as a suspected terrorist. You have no right to an attorney and can be held indefinitely.

The financial institutions that orchestrated the 2008 financial collapse are in control of the SEC and Federal Reserve Bank.

The company which has engineered entirely new genetic strains of food - Monsanto - is in control of the FDA.

The US Defense Budget never came down after The Cold War.

The organizations that are slowly assuming control of our democracy want you mad at that racist cop.

They produced that news show quite deliberately.

Hopefully voters will see through it all. Before our democracy is interrupted for a word from our sponsors.


May 17, 2015

Why didn't the US first nuke an empty place in Japan to show the results of the nuclear bomb and wait for their enemies to surrender?

To add to Andrew Warinner's excellent answer, WE WERE OUT OF BOMBS.

We blew one up at Trinity (plutonium.). That left two - one uranium and one plutonium.

We would never make another uranium bomb - uranium is just too arduous to refine. It took years just to make the one we had.

We dropped it on Hiroshima, having never tested it. We were confident it would work but didn't know. It was kind of a hail-Mary.

That left our last bomb - dropped on Nagasaki. We could then make new plutonium bombs at the rate of one per month.

Had the Japanese knew this they might not have surrendered.

The US was kind of bluffing with their meager nuclear arsenal. Spending even one without maximum civilian damage was tactically out of the question.

We were trying to create the illusion we had 500 of these things ready to go and also induce a state of shock and panic. A test wouldn't have accomplished the latter.

(Note - I oppose the use of The Bomb personally. I'm just giving my read of the chessboard at the time.)


May 18, 2015

Why do liberals fail to see the beauty of Ronald Reagan?

I'll bite. Those of us who lived through the Reagan years, of whatever political stripe, clearly see 'Reagan romanticism' as revisionist propoganda.

He was not well liked nor respected.

The salient features of his presidency, at the time, were :

He appeared to be a little senile. Forgetful and evasive. Would start sentences with his trademark "Well ...." He was not a figure which inspired confidence.

He had a very simplistic, boogie-man approach to foreign policy. He called the USSR an "evil empire" even as it was reforming and desired a stand-down from the Cold War. At a meeting in Iceland, the Soviets wanted both sides to eliminate up to 90% of their nuclear stockpiles, and stand down from a hair-trigger state of alert (fire on warning.). But Reagan wouldn't halt the 'Star Wars' missile defense program and negotiations fell apart. Turns out 'Star Wars' was infeasible and never built. We've still got thousands of missiles on both sides set to 'fire on warning.'

He spent money like crazy, running up the biggest peace-time deficits ever. "Spend but don't tax, just run up a tab." We called it Reaganomics. A euphemism for 'pointless, massive debt.'

He slashed funding for so many programs it created a whole generation of homeless people. Psychiatric hospitals, addiction treatment centers, etc. were shuttered and their populations emptied onto the streets.

He was corrupt. He traded arms for hostages; he secretly funded the Contras despite an existing law expressly forbidding it. When investigated, under oath, he would just claim he can't remember. Oh - and he massively expanded the Mujahideen. The training ground for a certain Osama Bin Laden.

He brought fundamentalist Christians into mainstream politics. "The religious right." This was a huge step backwards for civil rights, screwing up reproductive rights, gender equality, gay rights.

He fiddled while AIDS burned. Presumably because he thought it was a "gay disease" of no interest to the religious right. By the time he left office, a full-blown AIDS epidemic was underway.

On his way out of office, he held the door open for the Bush family to step in.


May 18, 2015

What are some facts about Hitler?

He was homeless when he first came to Vienna. At first he slept outside, then he went to a homeless shelter for men.


May 18, 2015

What were the mistakes that Hitler made that led him to lose World War II?

There were lots of reasons. We have the benefit of hindsight, so can't be too smug. But here goes. Nazi Germany :

Failed to finish off the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The British evacuated to safety, to fight another day.

Failed to realize the essential limitation of blitzkrieg (a rapid, mechanized, coordinated advance with planes, tanks, troop carriers) : It really only works over small patches of adjacent land. It doesn't work over water (Great Britain) or great distances (USSR). It's also sensitive to weather (the Werrmacht got bogged down in heavy rain on their way to Moscow. They were stuck in the mud.)

Lost the nuclear lead. It was Germans who first split the atom in 1938. But Hitler didn't initiate a serious A-bomb program.

Failed to secure an oil supply from an easy target. Instead, Hitler was counting on the Caucuses oil fields in the USSR.

Failed to upgrade their Enigma cypher. The allies cracked it and it was never changed.

The holocaust wasn't just an atrocity, it also diverted trains and fuel to no strategic effect.

Failed to get a u-boat or spy up close to carefully inspect Patton's "invasion force" opposite of Calais. Patton had hundreds of fake tanks and planes in order to make the Germans think Calais was to be the landing point for the Allied invasion. The ruse worked. Germany fortified Calais and left Normandy weakly defended.

The alliance with Japan was of no benefit. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Hitler should have condemned the act and broken off with Japan. America might have stayed out of Europe altogether.

Hitler micromanaged his generals and was an awful tactician. He wouldn't allow tactical retreats, for example.

The pace was too rushed. Even after 20 countries fell under Nazi rule, the Germans just kept invading. No time was taken to consolidate gains, rearm, rest troops, etc. Instead, the frantic pace kept the enemy alarmed, unified and energized.


May 19, 2015

What would George Patton's Quora account look like?

Tag line :

No dumb bastard ever got smart by answering questions. You get smart by making the other poor dumb bastard answer your questions.

May 22, 2015

Why was the United States so eager to stop the spread of communism during the Cold War period that it was willing to sacrifice so many American lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War?

Stalin was considered (justifiably) as murderous and expansionist as Hitler. He was just smart enough not to make war on the Western powers. His successors inherited this reputation.

So instead of war between NATO (capitalist) and The Warsaw Pact (communist), a series of 'proxy wars' broke out. These followed the same general pattern.

In a smaller country, there was either a civil war aleady under way or at least there was some armed opposition to the current government. The government would align themselves with either NATO or the USSR. The revolutionaries would align with the other bloc. Weapons poured into both sides of the conflict. Often, NATO or the USSR would get directly involved (but never both at the same time.)

The sad result of this was a series of destructive, protracted civil wars.


May 25, 2015

Why are Americans so proud of their history when the USA has a shorter history compared to some other countries in the world?

The USA has made terrible mistakes and committed atrocities in its early days, like slavery and our treatment of the indigenous peoples.

But we grew up. I will let Colin Powell explain our more recent pride,

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years .... and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in ....


-- Colin Powell, Switzerland, 2003.


May 25, 2015

When did the first human walked on the face of the earth?

Somewhere between 250,000 and 2,000,000 years ago.

The uncertainty is caused by issues of definition, the relative rarity of Homo Sapien fossils, and uncertainty about fossil fragments we do possess.


May 26, 2015

Why is the Jewish genocide of 30m German and 90m Russian Christians in the "world" and "civil" wars, "national" revolts and "communist" repressions not recognized, redressed and remembered?

Serge! We've missed you !


May 28, 2015

Zombies: What rights would those infected with zombism have?

During a zombie outbreak, civil order would either collapse or be replaced by martial law.

In either case the 'infected' would have no rights and be quickly killed by civilians and military (if any).

So if you wake up one morning, and there is nobody around at all, and you see an overturned bus, do NOT walk around yelling "helloooooooooo!!!!".

Slip quietly inside, armor up (motorcycle helmets are awesome), grab a weapon and quietly look for survivors to team up with.

Don't get bitten.


May 29, 2015

What is the most disturbing truth about life (i.e., death, money matters, looks matter, people change, it’s not what you know it’s who you know)?

No one gets out of here alive.


May 30, 2015

What had John Nash been working on in the decade before his death?

Dr. Nash was into all sorts of interesting topics, which he would publish on his web site.

Home Page of John F. Nash, Jr.

He describes his current interests as including "logic, game theory, and cosmology and gravitation."

Here's a sample where he's dabbling with a modified version of Einstein's Field Equation, Page on princeton.edu.

He doesn't list it, but I think he also took an occasional stab at the Riemann hypothesis.

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, Dr. Nash.


May 30, 2015

When did it become common knowledge in the Japanese civilian population during World War II that their nation was losing?

As the carpet- bombing of mainland cities had become routine, it would have been clear to the general population that air superiority had been lost, and all that implies : sunken carriers, lost island bases, possible fuel and pilot shortages.

This signalled imminent doom in the 1940's


Jun 2, 2015

How do programmers remember multiple languages irrespective of its usage?

Oh no. We've been found out.

OK, OK. No programmer remembers any language. Languages can get big with lots of libraries.

Developers keep a browser up so they can constantly look stuff up.


Jun 3, 2015

Why does Google offer unlimited storage for photos via Google Photos app? What's in it for Google?

When you are offered a free online product, you are the product.

To be sold to advertisers.


Jun 4, 2015

How much of modern civilization is owed to the discovery of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm?

Zip. Nothing. Not a goddamned thing.

Forget fast, just take the Fourier Transform (non-fast.) It was penned by Joseph Fourier in 1822.


Civilization had come a long way by 1820. We had gunpowder, astronomy, and calculus. The telegraph, the railway, the steam engine. Here's a photograph of London, 1820:


Oh. And we had photography. Paris, 1820 :

.
Certainly appears civilization is zipping along just fine without Fourier Transforms.

OK, I went a little overboard. Fourier Transforms were first motivated by the analysis and design of steam engines, especially the flow of heat within them. How hot will this part get? And how much will it expand? Is this whole thing going to explode or what? These questions give rise to tricky (partial) differential equations that a Fourier Transform helps with.

Would he have steam engines anyway? I think so. They would have plodded ahead empirically, by trial-and-error.

Fourier Transforms are also at the heart of a lot of lossy image compression, like .png, .mp3 and avi files. Discrete cosine transform

Could we have gotten by without the FFT ? It's hard to imagine we couldn't have. There are so many ways to approach data compression. We might have a less efficient but workable solution.

Spectral analysis of stars? (Star-light is refracted with a prism into its component colors, giving away the chemical composition.) Sure. It's a mistake to say that "this is in the frequency-, not time-domain, and is therefore a Fourier Transform." Scientists would just be screwing around with a prism one day and notice the effect. In fact that's exactly what happened in Isaac Newton's optics experiments (1666–1672).

There are some areas of signal processing we'd run into trouble with, like speech recognition or image recognition. But we don't need an FFT to break a signal into the frequency domain. For example, suppose we want to do speech recognition but our room-mate ate the last Fourier Transform :

Go to nature. There is an acoustical prism in our ear.

"The mammalian cochlea acts as an acoustic prism, mechanically separating the frequency components of sound so that they stimulate different populations of sensory cells." Page on nih.gov


While not having an FFT would make many tasks more difficult, and it's hard to imagine how mathematics and physics could fail to notice and evolve around it, I claim it's not a civilization blocker.

You wouldn't notice.


Jun 4, 2015

If the US Libertarians got their way, would the planet be in a perpetual state of war?

It already is.


Jun 4, 2015

What are some great "when I was your age" statements?

When I was your age, I would get up at 3:30 in the morning, build a truck, and drive to Nova Scotia !!


Jun 5, 2015

Why was Germany able to conquer France using Blitzkrieg tactics but failed to do so for Russia during World War II given that both were mighty European powers then?

Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was a carefully timed attack where air strikes are immediately followed by tanks and mechanized infantry.

eins


zwei


drei


It was shockingly effective for conquering small patches of adjacent land.
It left the defender paralyzed logistically and psychologically as the attack came from all directions. It was often concentrated to break through enemy defensive lines, then encircle and annihilate them.

We can see how Nazi Germany took over Europe one bite at a time.

For blitzkrieg to work, you've got to coordinate planes, tanks and troop carriers. Large bodies of water are a problem; there is just no way to move a large number of tanks and troops quickly over water.

Germany couldn't get across the English Channel.

Large distances are also a problem. First, the element of surprise is lost. Secondly a heavily mechanized army requires a lot of supplies, mainly fuel.
The supply lines get stretched too far, at the mercy of weather and enemy.
As the blitz gets slowed down by these factors, a counter-attack can be prepared beyond range of the enemy.

Soviet Union, 1939.

As Germany invaded the USSR, the advance to Moscow got bogged down in deep mud during freakish rains. This got them to outside Leningrad far later than planned, where the Russian winter paralyzed both man and machine.

Meanwhile, a massive Soviet counter-strike force was biding its time, training in Siberia. Once this force started to move against the weakened, under-supplied Germans ... it didn't stop until it got to Berlin.


Jun 5, 2015

Hypothetically, if the United Kingdom had allied with the Confederate Army & sent troops to fight, would the South have won the American Civil War?

I'll agree with Steve Franklin and go further : The Union would have lost.

The Union's big advantage was its industrial capacity. But almost all her industrial cities were coastal.

The British Navy would have nearly totally destroyed the Union's ability to manufacture.

Combine that with presumed loans of British pounds, the South would win - and perhaps conquer the North in the process.


Jun 6, 2015

How does one solve for x in xxx...=2?

When confronted with the infinite, this sort of trick often works.

Let S = x^(x^(x^ ... ))) . Notice that we can add another x^ term without changing the value, since there are infinitely many. That is,
S = x ^ S.
We are given that S=2, so that 2=x^2, x=sqrt(2). (We assumed that S exists and is unique, so technically that is a precondition of our answer.)

We can use this trick with infinity in lots of cases :
.
For instance, 0.999... = 1.
S=0.999 ...
S = 10 S - 9
S = 1.

For another, let S = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...
We see that
2 S = 1+ S.
S = 1.

I call this trick the 'infinite shift'. If you watch out for the hidden assumption of existence and uniqueness, it can really simplify things.


Jun 6, 2015

What would a competent alien invasion force do differently from the normal Hollywood portrayals?

It would be over in milliseconds, with no warning, and perhaps no human would have time to notice.

So the movie would be an instant flash of light.

A real alien intelligence would hit us from a distance at the speed of light (or close to it). So relativity would make it undetectable until it's here.

Hit us with what? It could be radiation, as in a Gamma Ray Burst. Or it could be a physical object, moving very close to c. The kinetic energy would be similar to an exctinction level meteor strike. In that case, it would take a few hours for the blazing atmosphere to envelope the planet. Some folks would see it coming.

Anyway. No love interest. No bromance. No wily or ironic defeat of the aliens. No dying hero, healed relationships, or self-realization.

Flash. Over.


Jun 6, 2015

How should I act when I don't agree with the majority of people because I think they don't think deeply enough?

My dad was a philosophy teacher. There was an assignment he (and many other profs) would use to get the kids used to philosophical thinking.

Assignment #1 :

Argue that Truth is Beauty.

Then the student flips the page.

Assignment #2 : Argue against your answer to #1.

You see, deep thinking is multiperspectival. You can see the point of socialism. You can see the point of capitalism. You can understand atheism or theism.

You do not believe every perspective, but you do not hold it in contempt because the other guy is "too dumb."

Who knows : you may even change your mind some time.

Deep thinkers do that.


Jun 6, 2015

Prejudice: Is it possible to dislike a lot of people without being prejudiced?

Sure, if you dislike *everybody* you're not prejudiced in the least.


Jun 6, 2015

Why is it so necessary to have a good vocabulary at the tip of your tongue, especially in today's world?

Words have shades of meaning. Nuance. Having command of many words helps you choose just the right shade.

For example, 'lost','defeated','vanquished'.

The words mean the same, but have a different shade - increasing severity from left to right.


Jun 6, 2015

What kind of person does that make me when I support equal rights for gay people, but I do not want my children to be gay?

It seems to me you're coming from an honest place, and though you'd be privately 'devasted' if one of your kids was gay you would stil be supportive.

So - good for you. You harbor a prejudice but refuse to let it affect your behavior.

We can't much help what we feel but we can choose what we do. And you've made the healthy, understanding choice. Right on.


Jun 6, 2015

What are some red flags that signal you should walk away from a start-up job?

Ask what they want you to do in the first 2 months.

There are hundreds of ways to avoid this question, "oh, there's lots to do!"; "oh, we'll be coordinating with ...", etc.

If there is no specific task, based on your experience, that matters - you're talking to people who are just trying to bump head count. You will be treated like an interchangeable cog on the 'tech side' of the company.

Never, ever take a job that doesn't see at least one future path based on your *unique* abitlies.


Jun 7, 2015

As a woman, do you ever find yourself frustrated by the wage gap between men and women? How do you deal with your frustration?

Oh boy. Why do I feel I am about walk into the whirling blades of a wheat thresher?

There is no significant wage gap between men and women. When we correct for education, experience, etc. we get a gap of 2 to 5 cents per dollar.

This article (written by a woman) gives sources to back up this claim :

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html

The free market would never allow such a gap. Greed trumps prejudice.

If there was a pay gap of 22% or 30%, companies would be eager to hire female talent on the cheap. Demand would rise for female workers as supply dropped. Companies would end up in a bidding war, offering higher salaries.

The gap closes by market forces alone.


Jun 9, 2015

I am a 24-year-old with an IQ of just 95. I feel depressed about it. What should I do?

Forget your IQ. I will share with you a secret:

The key component of talent is *taste*. The undefinable, subjective sense of beauty.

Those with talent have exceedingly good taste, which they always fall short of, causing them to redouble their efforts.

So. You don't know what you're doing at work. None of us do. We google like mad as the technical landscape changes every few years.

You're not satisfied with your work so far. You feel like a phony.

But here you are, getting your Masters.

If you ask me, I see all the seeds of genius in you.


Jun 11, 2015

I turned 23 and I feel old, is this normal? I have no car or career. I went back to school this year but I feel stuck.

It's the same for every age. Try this :
Take out a pen and paper. Oh - sorry, wrong generation.

OK open a text editor. Make 3 sections:

Girlfriends/Crushes/Brief relationship. Here, list your ex's. add a note next to each saying something nice.

Now all the cars you've ever owned.

And now the jobs you ever had.


If you go through this exercise I believe you will see that ... You've only just arrived.


Jun 11, 2015

Did most Germans think they were in the right in starting World War II because they believed the Gleiwitz Incident was a real Polish attack?

It's a fair bet, given that no free press existed from 1933-1945. The only news you got was Nazi-filtered.

Sure, you could listen to the BBC on AM radio. But it was illegal to be a 'radio traitor' so you had to be sneaky about it. If you shared what you heard to anyone, the penalty was the guillotine.

So the average German would have believed reports of Polish military attacks, and mistreatment of German-speaking people within their own borders.

However, as Germany invaded country after country - twenty (!) of them successfully invaded and annexed - it became obvious to everyone that Hitler's ambition was beyond reason, he was probably insane, and his brinksmanshi and endless aggression set Germany on a course of destruction.

This becomes especially clear when we consider how many high ranking staff tried to kill him.


Jun 11, 2015

Why does the Monty Hall problem seem counterintuitive?

We tend to attach probability to objects, and assume that events are independent. So you got three doors, and we quickly say "1/3, 1/3, 1/3", which is actually true at that time.

The cognitive error that people make (even the great Paul Erdos), is they think these probabilities *stick* to the doors; that the three doors are independent and the probability is
fixed.

"Each door stays a third, it's not like you can smuggle in fresh goats."

So that's the trap. We can instantly see the trap with this thought experiment : Suppose Monty opened 2 doors.

It's easy to see the probability of the remaining door change from 1/3 to 1 as new information and interdependence change all the numbers.

Put differently - the experiment shows we can change the probability of a door without touching it. So, nothing "happened" to it. That's counterintuitive.


Jun 11, 2015

Why do people, even the atheist ones, talk about God as a person or light rather than an omnipresent subatomic being that makes up all the things in this world as a whole?

You're describing pantheism : the doctrine that God is everywhere and in everything, from candlesticks to quarks.

This particular belief system simply isn't shared by most theists. They believe in a single God, located beyond our space-time (or at least too far away to detect.)

While this perspective is obvious to you, it is not to most religious people.

And the atheists think both camps are full of crap.

So you have little company.


Jun 11, 2015

If God exists, why is there suffering and/or evil? Why does he allow tragedies? How does one rationalize that? If free will explains human disasters, what explains natural disasters?

Ah, the Problem of Evil. Reconciling evil in the world with benevelent divinity has occupied men's thoughts since Ancient Greece.

My favorite answer is the Buddha's. Violence is the physical manifestation of violence in the mind. Every violent man is, in some sense, insane.

Then there comes 'dissatisfaction'. Yearning, desire, resentment for something not ours. The Buddha said this is a sickness of the mind, and we don't need to obtain these things. Rather, we must release unhealthy desire. Let go of envy, craving, coveting.

The Buddha tries to heal the tyrant and his victim at once - by radically altering their perspective.


Jun 11, 2015

What is the closest you have been to a lighting strike?

My familiy's little house in the colonial town of Norwich, CT was up a very steep hill, climbing maybe 700 ft from sea level.

I was eleven when the storm came. My bedroom window faced north, as the slashing lightening approached. I cuddled my cat Gideon as he cleaned my face with his rough tongue. Gideon took pride in ignoring storms.

It was nothing to do with storms. I know it sounds crazy but it was a passenger jet, maybe a 747. It departed from my window, *screaming* as it ascended, up up and into the sky.

Only later did I figure out the thunder began out my window and then came shortly later from the thunder bolt going straight up.

Every light bulb in the room exploded. The jolt blew every plug out of its socket. Most everything, but my turntable, succumbed to a blue flash.

Gideon hurt his ankle and scratched me up, running.

To your question : that strike was 5-7 feet away. It left me, Gideon, and my record player intact.


Jun 12, 2015

What are the most important papers published in Science?

The biggest jolt to scientific theory came in 'The Miracle Year' for Albert Einstein (1905). He published four different papers, each of which disrupted and redirected scientific thought. Any single one of them would make a scientist famous. The fact that Einstein - unknown to the scientific community and a lowly patent clerk - produced *four* in one year is, of itself, without precedent.

You can read about them here :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers


Jun 13, 2015

When a boyfriend insists on knowing about your past (number of previous partners), should you be honest, or should you lie?

Tell the truth or tell a lie?

You should be silent. This sort of pre-relationship interrogation is out of bounds.

Any participation in it legitimizes it and sets loose the furies. He will have an infinite number of follow-up questions.

He may stop asking or he may walk away. Both outcomes are for the best.

You have not given away your entire self, and never should.


Jun 13, 2015

Why have white people never apologized for their actions against slaves, Native Americans or minorities?

We ... Wouldn't know where to start.


Jun 13, 2015

How realistic is the theory that nuclear weapons are a hoax as the referenced film implies?

The existence of nuclear reactors, which extract astonishingly large amounts of power from heavy metals, exist for sure. You can go visit.

Using a purer isotope and releasing all that energy in an instant seems a much simpler problem than harnessing it slowly, attaching a turbine, water pump and condenser all while avoiding a run-away chain reaction.

A world with reactors and not bombs seems unlikely in the extreme.


Jun 14, 2015

Who invented makeup?

We can't find the origin no matter how far we go back. Just more makeup.

It appears that man has an instinct to adorn himself. Every place Man appears, we find makeup for women, 'war paint' for men, and other adornments to signal social status or tribal origin. Some archeologists think that all-over body paint was the first military uniform, making it easier for your brothers to avoid spearing you by mistake.

For example, we can see the heavy, dark eye makeup of Ancient Egyptian women and men. The Egyptians did us a favor by burying makeup kits with their royalty for use in the after-life.

So we know that they primarily used malachite (green) and kohl (black).

From writings and other artifacts we even have a good idea how it looked :

Recreation of ancient Egyptian makeup.

There is a strong case to be made that wherever Man appears, He instantly begins to modify his appearance.


Jun 14, 2015

What do current Uber employees feel about Uber raiding Carnegie Mellon?

Uber "raided" nobody, so the answer to your question is "nothing." That language is click-bait.

Uber hired away 40% of CMU's researchers. Each of whom made a personal decision to leave CMU in favor of Uber.

That's not a raid. That's universities providing technical talent to cutting edge US companies.

Kind of the whole idea.


Jun 14, 2015

How many elementary polynomials must be introduced in order to express all solutions to an NTH degree polynomial in closed form?

See Galois Theory.

"Most" 5th degree polynomials are unsolvable by any algebraic expression.


Jun 14, 2015

What's the name of this device?

I can't give you the name (tried to coax it out of google images to no avail), but I can get you a bit closer.

It's clearly an mp3 player (at least). And there is one important clue : the button to Play is labelled "Open". Anything developed primarily for US customers would never do that; they would check the language through native american english speakers and label the button "Play".

So it appears to be a "brand Z" mp3 player. It may or may not be capable of video. I'll promote this question, until then ...


Jun 15, 2015

Did the Japanese have a similar worldview in WWII like the Nazis?

Germany envied Ancient Rome at the height of her Empire.
Japan envied the modern UK at the height of hers.


Jun 15, 2015

How can critical thinking be applied to interpretation of historical documents?

I think is a totally vacuous question.

We should always use our critical thinking when studying history. We've got all this evidence and written records and have to sort out what's true. Like anything else.

As for 'models','frameworks', etc - these are labels applied to natural human thought after the fact; to try to see a system in the rear view mirror.

It's all a haze of verbiage.


Jun 15, 2015

Why has Prime Minister of the Kingdom of God Serge Grishenkoff been unlawfully detained by the jews-run UK since 2005?

BAHAHAHAHA the Brits keep tossing you in jail.

Come to the USA where freedom of speech is almost absolute. (You may have to duck a few thermoses and rubber chickens ...)


Jun 15, 2015

What are the rumours theorizing Obama creating a [false flag] crisis in order to remain president before his end of term?

It would require a constitutional amendment repealing Amendment 22, ratified in 1947 after FDR held 4 consecutive terms.

So if Obama were to set off a false flag disaster, he would still need to convince either

2/3 the house, 2/3 the senate, and 3/4 of the individual states.

(Never been done - ) both houses to hold a Constitional Convention where 3/4 of the states vote yes.


So Obama isn't going to get a third term without a hell of a lot of Republicans opting to repeal Amendment 22 (as provided for in Article 5).


Jun 16, 2015

If you could only read a single book from a given field (history, economics, politics, psychology, etc.), what would it be?

All of these are 'popular' texts, but there are a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners, so hopefully it's not too mid-brow.

Psychology : Man and His Symbols, -- Carl Jung.

Christianity : The Screwtape Letters, the Chronicles of Narnia.. (Both are fictional, the latter entirely allegorical.). -- C S Lewis

Mathematical logic and AI: Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. -- Douglas Hofstadter. (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Physics : Five Not So Easy Pieces, R. Feynman.

Physics : The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene.

Anthropology/Psychology -- Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankel

Anthropology : Guns, Germs and Steel. --Jared Diamond.

Anthropology : The Naked Ape. -- Desmond Morris

Cosmology : A Brief History of Time, and The First Three Minutes. -- S Hawking.

World War II : Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Economics : The Wealth of Nations. -- Adam Smith.

Economics : Das Kapital. -- Karl Marx. (One needs to hear both capitalist and Marxist arguments.)


Jun 16, 2015

How do historians reconcile the death toll for the Holocaust and this fact?

It's a fair question and I don't think the OP should be called a denier or assailed in any way.

First and foremost, the camps crematoria *were* overwhelmed in the extreme. Especially as petroleum became scarce. The Nazis struggled with this, and attempted to arrange the bodies in a pile over an outdoor pit such that bodies acted as fuel for other bodies.

There were piles of bodies long after the trains stopped coming, and the Soviets liberated the camps.

Also, the figure of 6 M is probably high. It's not like the Nazis kept careful records - this was supposed to be carried out in secret.

Modern estimates run about 4 M.

So yea - holocaust happened. Numbers fuzzy, crematoria way over their heads.


Jun 16, 2015

Just quit smoking last month, with phlegm and chest congestion for about 2 months? Could this be COPD?

Your symptoms are not unusual at all for someone who quit smoking 2 months ago.


Jun 17, 2015

What do people think about Donald Trump running for President of the USA?

Trump loves attention. He often deliberately walks into crowds at sporting events just to wade in the buzz. He's the only real-estate developer to do the talk show circuit.

My guess is he is driven by inner conflicts. He wants to be seen as Henry Ford or Edison : Brilliant, practical, successful. He often says "I am smart" which of course no smart person does. He also says " I know what it takes to make success", when no - he was born rich and screwed his creditors using bankruptcy protection. My theory is he wants fame as a stage on which to construct the man he wishes he were.

In any case his love for attention is no guess. He knows he can't win even the Nomination. He may siphon off a sliver of votes and cost a candidate a critical one percent a la Nader.

He just wants to be up there. Candidate for President. Smart. Possessed of success. See how his eyes squint with the removed, incisive intellect of a brilliant and important man.

A misguided punch-line. What Trump really needs is a hug.


Jun 17, 2015

Why do I look at relationships like Maths, If my friends spend $100 in return spend exactly $100?

I've seen in people; there is very precise "transacting" in even close relationships. It's not awful, but it's a bit tedious for you and others. Especially if there's a slip-up and they pay 95 where you pay 100. You ruminate over being cheated way more than 5 bucks is worth.

I've noticed it a hard thing to break and I can't tell you its origins. But it may be helpful (tho painful) to do this :
Always give 20% more than your share. Calculate it exactly. 20%. But do the calculation secretly.
Now you are still precise but being a little generous. Before you lament how much this will cost you - whoops - your friend just overpaid a little. He noticed you do.
But because you'll usually kick in more, you automatically 'lose' the transaction.
You'll get used to losing, and won't worry about. You throw down a little extra for some peace of mind.
When you are entirely used to losing - suprise. You won.

You're generous.


Jun 17, 2015

What is the principal and most difficult question mathematical question at present (2015) ?

The Riemann Hypothesis http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis is probably the biggest outstanding problem right now (virtually all mathematicians took a stab at it.) It underpins a lot of questions about the distribution primes. It is devilishly simple to state.
John Nash happened to be working on this when he was overcome by pscizophrenia. Mathematicians would only half-joke that the problem could drive a person mad; Nash himself said of his breakdown that he was "breathing air too thin for mortal man."

So have at it. But pace yourself.


Jun 18, 2015

16,06,68,88,x,98. What is x?

Turn your screen upside down and the answer becomes clear.


Jun 18, 2015

Where does number e appear in nature (real life)?

There are so many examples, here is but one. I give you the hyperbolic cosine function :


This is how a suspended rope/chain/wire will hang between two posts :


Big deal? It has a pretty stunning application :


It can hold the greatest weight.

Sure the big cable would just hang that way anyway, but having the equation enables us to precisely construct the rest of the structure.

Flip the curve upside down and that is the shape of the best arch. So it's everywhere in arch ... -itechture..


Jun 18, 2015

Which cities suffered the most during The Second World War on both sides?

Germany : Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf. These cities were targeted with firebombs for maximum civilian causalities and indiscrimate destruction.

Soviet Union : Stalingrad. Besieged by Nazi Artillery, many civilians starved to death.

Poland : Warsaw. Warsaw was targeted for systematic demolition by the Nazis. It then got caught in the cross-fire of street fighting between Germany and the USSR. 84% of the city was destroyed by war's end.

Japan got it bad, given its small landmass, combustible cities. America - deeply inflamed at this point - let loose with all her industrial capacity, undiluted by any other Axis enemy.

Toyama was totally destroyed. All the following were more than 60% destroyed :
Okayama, Kagoshima, Imabari, Matsuyama, ... the list is unending.
And then we have Horishima and Nagasaki.


Jun 18, 2015

Donald Trump: Why wouldn't you vote for Donald Trump for president?

He's a complete buffoon with the politic experience of a tooth brush.


Jun 18, 2015

Is Jimmy Wales good as a person or he is a person who worries only about money?

Wikipedia is the 6th most visited site in the world. It doesn't feature a single ad.

Whatever criticisms you wish to make (or invent) about Jimmy Wales, greed isn't one of them.


Jun 18, 2015

Why do white people hide behind racism when talking about the President of the United States?

When the curtain closed it wasn't racism that pulled the lever for Obama among a majority of white Americans..


Jun 18, 2015

I saw a video of a preacher warning homosexuals about Judgment Day. I told someone they shouldn't do this and that person told me the preacher has a right to hold signs because he has freedom of speech. The person doesn't even consider it bullying. What do you think? (see sub-questions)

He has a right to hold bigoted signs.

You have a right to tell him he's wrong.

Freedom is not freedom from offense.

It is the freedom to dissent.


Jun 20, 2015

Will US citizens ever force a radical change to make the U.S. Government a fair and equal democracy, and is it even feasible to do so?

They can do it now. In two minutes.

The American people are being misled by a news media whose purpose is to distract. Isolated acts of violence (especially between the races), non stories like a white girl that faked being black, and so on.

The American people are lapping it up. The real issue in the last 20 years has been the dangerous erosion of our civil liberties, the corporate control of the organs of government, the looming crises of peak oil/global warming, etc.

But Americans consume media that distracts, not informs. We are to blame. While deeply tragic, a church shooting of white-on-black violence is a small town's heart- break, not a great nation's agenda and future.

Turn it off. Corporate-controlled media. Just walk away and pay attention to our real problems.

Don't buy things you don't need. Reduce your consumption and waste.
Decide what you really care about for yourself and our nation today, in 10 years, in 30.

Vote accordingly.

"The movement you need - is on your shoulders." -- John Lennon


Jun 20, 2015

Why is Lyndon Johnson not revered by liberals?

LBJ was the most effective liberal since FDR (If I may refer to FDR as a liberal.)

It was Vietnam. Before Johnson left office, refusing to run for a second term, a deeply depressed Johnson quipped to an aide :

"Nobody will remember Head Start. The Great Society. Back-to-back voting rights acts. No.
"Vietnam. Vietnam. Vietnam. I am the only American president to lose a war. Vietnam. They will shove Vietnam up my my ass forever."


Jun 20, 2015

If there is another Cold War, does either the US or Russia remember how to fight cold wars?

Remember?

The US never stopped. We maintain a Cold War posture; a staggering defense budget, globally deployed forces, massive clandestine 'intelligence' apparatus, sizeable (unprovoked) war once a decade.

We swapped out 'terrorist' for 'communist' and didn't skip a beat.


Jun 20, 2015

Why is it accurate to treat Hitler as the most evil person in history?

It's a tough one, but the Shoah (Holocaust) was the world's first case of a mechanized, systematic effort at industrialized death.

It is more chilling than a bomb killing an innocent. Because unlike the bomb, there is this orderly process of dehumanization (victim and perpetrator alike.)


Jun 20, 2015

What does a man like to hear from a woman?

When she looks at you with wide, glistening doe-eyes, bites her lip slightly, touches your forearm and says,

"No other man on earth could fight off the Zombie apocalypse like you could."


Jun 20, 2015

Why is x52x4+5x310x2+4x8 irreducible? What does it mean for something to be irreducible?

This gets into Galois Theory.

To say that polynomial is irreducible is to say it has no 'algebraic' roots. 'Algebraic' means rational numbers together with roots; they can be square roots, cube roots, they can be nested, etc. They can even be roots of negative numbers (so we're talking about the Complex Plane.)

For the proof, you must consult the last will and testament of a French prodigy named Galois, penned the night before he was fatally shot in a duel.

Galois proved that polynomials of degree > 4 are not generally reducible.

It's not easy but Galois theory is structural, beautiful - stunningly so.

Galois starts with polynomials but quickly dispenses with all that calculating machinery. All he needs is to study how the roots can be permuted. He uncovers a calculus of symmetry.

It now underlies physics, cryptography - 'Groups' are everywhere.

By the time Galois disposes of 5th degree polynomials, this result is a mere footnote to his central insight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory

If you know a bit of French, Galois' hurried last paper is very accessible, though it is peppered throughout with heartbreaking asides, (the reader will find the solution - I have not time. I have not time.)


Jun 20, 2015

When is the first historical record of Armies marching?

This probably goes back to the Ancient Greek phalanx :


Soldiers marched in a tight, square formation. Their shields formed a wall while their spears moved with synchronized lethality.

The only way to keep these units together is to march in lock-step.

The Phalanx was later used by the Romans. Marching worked its way deep into Western culture.

Interestingly, in real modern combat soldiers don't march. Strutting around, a dozen men wide, is unthinkable in, say, the trenches of World War I.

But there is a psychological impact of the spectacle of soldiers marching on parade. The sight of this armed, trained, unified mass moving in perfect formation, boots slamming the ground like a singular unwavering beast - is impressive to behold and builds esprit de corps among the soldiers.


Jun 21, 2015

Why are Americans so dumb to put firearms in everyone's hands rather than seek total civil disarmament (assuming the US federal government distributes firearms to the entire US population)?

Quora is not a platform to espouse your views thinly veiled as a rhetorical question.


Jun 21, 2015

There is a girl in my University who I have a crush on. I took pictures of her without her permission and she was upset. Will she forgive me or tell someone?

Um, I mean this in a nice way.

You are basically creeping on this girl. You spend all class staring at her, sneak pictures of her, arrange to bump into her accidentally on purpose.

This is creepy, obsessive behavior which scares women off. This particular girl is lost, you're going to have to get used to that.

But there is much to be taken by this. *Why* is she lost. Put yourself in her shoes. Of course she notices your staring (all class!), realizes you bumped into her on purpose. Then the pictures.

How uncomfortable is that for her? How would you like it?

Even if she liked you at first ... You never spoke to her.

Read that last line again. Instead you indulged yourself without a thought of her. Staring, pictures, masturbating. All a far distance from simple human communication.

Next time : Introduce yourself and say hello. Don't stare. Sneak photos. Arrange to bump into her.

Respect her space, her privacy, her right to reject you.

Getting turned down hurts a lot less than what you just went through.

Oh - and you asked if she will tell someone. Yes, she already has.


Jun 21, 2015

After learning some of the history of the two world wars, I cannot help but wonder if Germany is "a sleeping beast" (that might wake up one day) or has it changed completely from the core with its new generation?

Is Germany a sleeping beast ?

American slavery and war of annihilation against the indigenous people. Rwanda. Stalin's purges. Idi Amin. Pol Pot. Imperial Japan.

There was nothing inherently German about the inhuman treatment of humanity. This darkness lives in the human heart.

"And the raven still is sitting,
Never flitting, never flitting.
And his eyes have all the seeming,
Of a demon's, that is dreaming." -- EA Poe, The Raven


Jun 21, 2015

What was Earth like before it was hit by the Mars-sized planet that caused our moon to be formed?

It is possible, but earth still was way too hot. We had a 6 hour long day so thermally that brought pretty wide temperature swings. We also had almost no atmosphere and probably no liquid water.


Jun 22, 2015

Why didn't Khrushchev intervene in Vietnam during 1961-75?

To augment Jon Mixon's answer :

During the Cold War, both sides took great pains that their armed forces would never meet head-on.

It was just too dangerous. A skirmish could easily erupt into WW III. This became especially clear during The Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Kremlin ordered a nuclear torpedo to be fired at American ships enforcing a blockade. Vasili Arkhipov disobeyed that order and refused to launch. He is now regarded as a hero.

Had that nuclear torp. been launched, a few things were fairly certain to ensue.

Cuba would have been destroyed completely by a retaliatory strike. A half-dozen 5-megaton bombs would suffice.

Every Soviet ship in the Western Hemisphere would be sunk with a small, tactical nuke.

Kennedy would probably have stopped here. There's no telling what the Soviet reaction would be. But they'd hit back somehow.

Now we've got both sides slinging nukes at each other.

But Arkhipov didn't fire. Both sides emerged with the realization that their armed forces must never come into contact.

So they stayed out of Vietnam. We stayed out of Afghanistan.

"We eyed each other from across a trembling world." -- Pres Truman


Jun 22, 2015

If the wealthiest 1% of Americans shouldn't own 40% of the country's financial wealth, what is a more appropriate breakdown?

Whatever the market will bear.

Let me explain.

For the wealthy, income redistribution is not a moral issue. Rather, it's a means to ensure the safety of their position.

The rich are badly outnumbered. They know it.

So long as the average joe can buy a house, have a job, leisure time, retirement, etc, he won't begrudge the wealthy too much.

When the average joe doesn't see a decent chance, things become very dangerous for the wealthy.


Jun 22, 2015

What do American people think is the reason for breast cancer?

I believe it's a) genetic predisposition and b) the extended lifespan of the 20th century. Nobody dies of TB, appendicitis, childbirth, etc. So women are living much longer, giving breast cancer a bigger chance to emerge.


Jun 23, 2015

How do I micromanage details of a startup idea?

The best way is not to.

You are describing the 'Big Bang' approach. Trying to get every detail perfect.

Instead, determine the minimal nugget of functionality which gets the essentials only done. No 'nice-to-haves'. This is called the MVP - minimal viable product.

Now build it. Fast. Release it - fast. Watch an learn.

Iterate. Decide which features you want to add, modify or remove in your next version.

Keep the design as flexible as possible.

Some scholars think the explosion of culture that was The Rennaisance comes down to one small thing : oil paint.

Oil paint takes a long, long time to dry. After it was put to canvas, the artist could still make modifications. It allowed for second thoughts.

Don't finish your product before building it. Build an MVP and let people play with it.

Loosen up.


Jun 23, 2015

How would George Patton have waged the Vietnam War?

He would have been carried off by MP's (after knocking out the first half dozen who came), shouting an endless stream of expletives directed at the President, the Pentagon, the CIA, South Vietnamese, NATO, SECSTATE, SECDEF, Chairman of Join Chiefs -

Oh. They gagged him.


Jun 23, 2015

What does it tell me about big companies: If a person doesn't come up with an answer in 10 minutes, does he not fit in your culture?

I majored in math, so I know how to do that function from scratch.

But you know what? There is only one correct answer I would expect which is "Use the math library function. It's fast, debugged, and universally understood."

An effort to roll your own wastes time and introduces risk.


Jun 23, 2015

Would Rommel have been executed by the Allies had he survived the war?

No.

He would have been given a teaching post at West Point.


Jun 23, 2015

I have watched a lot of scary movies but I never seem to get scared. They're all too hokey for me. I want to actually see a movie where I become terrified. What are some good scary/horror movies I should watch?

28 Days Later, in addition to breathing new life (sorry) into the Zombie genre, is not just scary, it's beautifully scary.


Jun 23, 2015

I forgot to take Ritalin today and my head feels so foggy I can't think. Is this normal?

Absolutely.

Ritalin boosts dopamine and brain activity. If you suddenly come off it, you get a backlash effect where you are even more foggy than before you ever took Ritalin.

You may want to get one of those pill keychains and keep a day's dose on you, for such occasions.

* I am not a doctor and should never be allowed to be one.


Jun 23, 2015

What is the worst response to 'I love you'?

'I get that a lot."


Jun 23, 2015

I want to attack Great Britain and become the King. How can I defeat the British army?

To add a bit to Jimmy Wales' answer, I am reminded of another statement by Churchill. This one was not part of a speech, but made in private to the Outer Cabinet. Lord Halifax wanted to explore peace negotiations with Hitler. Churchill told the ministers,

"If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground".


This persuaded the ministers. You might find it uninspiring. I do. I'd want to jump out a window and head for Canada. But I am not British.

This speaks to the indomitable British will. They may be pushed out of their colonies, but they will never, never accept defeat on their island home.

One must not attack a people whose battle cry is "Death!" :


Jun 24, 2015

I have an idea for an “answer engine.” Basically, a search engine that just gives answers to simple questions using a large database, and annotated natural language processing a la the MIT Start engine. What do you think of my idea?

Ask Jeeves was an early attempt to do this.

The beauty of google is its simplicity, we just search for words or phrases in a page. We use our wits to choose the search. In a sense, google is a user-assisted answer engine.

In order to process a question, you need to really understand the words, the context, the culture. It's a very hard and open problem.

For example : where can I find strawberries ?

Ok - do you want to *buy* them or just *find* them ? Regardless of season or opportunistically when they're in season? Are you asking what regions of the country has the climate suitable for them? What countries culturally eat them? In what dishes they appear?

Nobody has ever solved this in general. By all means try, but don't underestimate the task before you.


Jun 24, 2015

What do think about the US's military actions in the last decade?

Tragic.

We invaded Afghanistan under the pretense of ferreting out Osama Bin Laden. We let him slip away out negligence, lending creedance to the theory we just wanted to secure the natural gas pipelines.

We invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses. We were warned by the French and others. Not a single WMD was found.

The US has lost enormous credibility, our alliance with the UK is damaged (they believed us), Iraq is an unstable mess and Afghanistan isn't in that great shape either.

It's probably our worst decade.


Jun 25, 2015

Lately I've started to neglect my wife. I'm jealous of her and barely pay attention to her. I was never like this in the past. What's going on?

I knew a guy who his a similar issue. His lady was totally hot and cool but he couldn't get past it. He lost her.

I think you should consider therapy so you don't end up like my friend.


Jun 25, 2015

What are the best books, museums, and other resources about the history of slavery in the U.S. that counter the nostalgic idea that it was mostly a benevolent institution?

Holy cow. It is true that a few slaves had reasonably good lives as part of the extended family, taking up residence in the mansion.

It is also true that a few Jews were spared during the Holocaust because they were useful to some ranking official.

But these are exceptions. The typical life of a slave was hard labor in the field. In addition to freedom, they were denied family (children were often torn from screaming mother's arms at auction), education, health care, property - they had nothing at all.

When they were too old to work, they were put down with a bullet like a horse.

No spouse, no children, no legacy. They existed as a piece of farm equipment; a non-life.

There can never be even a shred of nostalgia for this crime against humanity.

I would suggest the old TV miniseries Roots. Though fictionalized it is well researched and a sharp reality check to anyone who claims "the slave days wasn't all bad."


Jun 25, 2015

Why was I taught in school that the American Civil War was really about states' rights?

There is some genuine contention over the root cause of the war. Slavery?Tariffs? State's rights? Was it all Lincoln's fault ?

The issue is further muddled by Lincoln's initial ambivalence regarding slavery.

There was sort of an apologist movement in education in the 70's. The underlying theme was that the white, male, rich power structure protects only itself. So the aggression against native Americans was re-emphasized. The Civil War was recast as a squabble over tariffs.

However, that view of the civil war doesn't survive even a cursory reading of the documents of the time (and is no longer taught.)

The war was about slavery, it was only about slavery, no other factor even came close to plunging the union into this blood bath.

And it was unavoidable. The abolitionist movement was gaining power in the north. Abroad, slavery was in rapid decline. New states were being added to the union forcing the issue : slave or free?

Lincoln was no abolitionist (at first) but the south *thought* he was. The dollar value of all the slaves (if I may be excused for putting a price tag on people) exceeded the value of every northern factory, mill, and railroad combined.

Slavery was doomed, but the south had built their economy on it. There was just no compromise available, no way to reconcile this issue.

It would take a war.


Jun 25, 2015

Is it morally (not necessarily legally) right for a person to evade/refuse military conscription in peace time if he thinks the government is oppressive and the military is corrupt and nepotic?

In fact, we have a positive moral obligation to resist taking up arms without just cause.

Does this mean we all get to decide for ourselves what is just?

Yes. It's always been that way.


Jun 25, 2015

Would the USA actually lose access to Middle Eastern sources of petroleum if it withdrew its troops and stopped intervening militarily and politically in the region? What are we actually defending over there?

Maybe. American skittishness over Arab Oil has its seeds in the OPEC oil embargo in the 70's.

Even though we don't get most of our oil from there, even a 5% drop in supply wreaks havoc.

The embargo resulted in "oil shocks" which screwed up our economy for almost 10 years.

Since then, we have sought to ensure that Arab oil exporters are friendly to us, and especially not united against us.


Jun 25, 2015

Other than intelligence, what else are humans well adapted for?

Diverse climate.

We use clothing and fire to adjust for cooler weather. For hot weather, we already have a remarkably effective cooling system. Humans thrive even above the arctic circle.

Disruption in food supply. We don't over-specialize, and we seek out food sources that are in great supply. If there are natural competitors for that food supply we often wipe them out.

Each other. We are remarkable peaceful with each other compared to other species.


Jun 25, 2015

Is there a movie about the future that deals with the question of whether people will need to work after machines become very advanced?

Cynically, the film WALL-E addresses this. Robotics has taken over all labor and people don't have to work or, um, get up.

They turn into amorphous fat blobs zipping around in fancy mobility scooters.

They're also very boring.

Fortunately (?) all this advanced technology destroyed the Earth's ecosystem so mankind had to evacuate aboard a huge spaceship.

The movie hints that they will return to Earth, and start to make things right again.

That is, get off their fat asses:


Jun 25, 2015

What's to stop the crew of the ISS from repopulating the Earth after an extinction level event?

A rapid Mass Extinction (like a meteor strike) would tend to leave a few thousand people anyway. (People lucky enough to be in a mine shaft or buried under Walmart debris.)

The problem is they have no way to find each other - all technology being wiped out - and more importantly, the entire food chain has collapsed.

So here comes a hundred year winter. The meteor burned up all wood and anything else flammable above the surface. So no fire. And you got no food.

Ah crap, here comes a mega tsunami ...


Jun 25, 2015

My 8-year-old daughter is not a fan of reading and no matter how much my husband and I try, she refuses to read. How do I get her to read?

I had the same problem at eight. My father was a rather insightful teacher (of college kids by day, and 8-year olds by night.). He solved the problem this way.

I wasn't even aware he was trying to get me to read. I put it together years later.

Once a week, a library book would just appear in my room. They were of all different genres, some written for kids, some not. I can't tell you more because I didn't read them. I felt no pressure to. I just got used to their weekly appearance.

He kept at it. And at it. Week after week. Month after month. He only ever said "just give it a look."

Until finally, he struck. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I came downstairs excitedly babbling about a closet that led to a snowy kingdom.

My Dad didn't praise me. He received the news with feigned distraction. He got up and as he was walking out said, "when you get to Aslan, keep in mind that CS Lewis is a devout Christian."

So I finished it. It disappeared and no new book appeared. I asked my Dad, "no book this week?"

"Check your closet. It is a gateway to a magic kingdom."

The entire Chronicles of Narnia were there as a boxed set. No library stamp, he bought them.

I read the whole thing in a couple of weeks.

Next appeared A Wrinkle In Time. My Dad was figuring out I like classical fantasy.

As he cast around like this he hit upon science fiction (Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke). He noticed I favored British authors.

He didn't worry about my 8-year old sensitivities; I read end-of-the-world books like Lucifer's Hammer and dystopian scifi like Brave New World.

I was reading constantly by 9 and by 10, just turn me loose in a book store or library and I'd emerge with an armload of books.

* (7/8/2015 - Thanks to Introducing Fatherly - A Practical Lifestyle Guide For Dads for reprinting this post. The Clever Trick My Dad Used To Turn Me Into A Rabid Reader At 8 Years Old )

Jun 28, 2015

What general objects do most men like, besides themselves, women, sex and sport?

Motorcycles, guns, explosives.

Anything we can hurt ourselves with.


Jun 28, 2015

Is culture equal?

You're in a hurry so,
of course not.


Jul 4, 2015

What were the major mistakes made by Hitler and the Axis powers during WW2?

This comes up a lot, so I'll come at it a little differentially.

Germany should not have fought the war with conventional weapons.

Germany alone split the uranium atom in 1938. They should have kept that secret.

At this point, Hitler should have hit pause. The reparations were gone, Austria had been annexed, the German economy was on the mend.

Hitler had been told of the potential of the atomic bomb. If only he listened. He could have backed off the antisemitism which had decimated his universities. Put everything into building the bomb, while smiling at his neighbors.

The cannon-type "little boy" design was too simple to miss. Given 6 years he could have isolated lots of weapons-grade U-235.

Rather than collapsing into ruin in 1945, Nazi Germany could have conquered Europe, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in just a couple of weeks.


Jul 4, 2015

From an existentialist point of view, why do organisms procreate?

Selection bias.

Non procreating organisms are gone.


Jul 4, 2015

Where can I buy Johnson Creek smoke juice?

One of my favorites.

Http://www.johnsoncreeksmokejuice.com

Wisconsin Frost is my favorite.

Note : I have no financial interest in this post.


Jul 4, 2015

What is the single worst quality of the human race?

We will die on a beach to defend the liberty of people we will never meet.

But we will walk past the hungry and do nothing.


Jul 4, 2015

If human genes are selfish then why do we have altruism?

See that bee hive? Mmmm so much yummy honey. Man, you'll be eating that for two days.

All you have to do is whack it with a stick and the bees fly away.

Oh, wait. They won't. They attack you in droves and sting you. You might die.

Each bee that stings you is on a suicide mission. Vital organs are expended with the stinger.

But you walk past and leave the bees in peace.

There is evolutionary pressure for both individuals and for groups to survive.


Jul 5, 2015

If the weakest nation today fought the strongest nation from 1,000 years ago in a war, who would win?

I'm pretty sure the Ancient Roman Empire would level Lichtenstein:


Jul 5, 2015

What will happen if Google starts charging for every search?

Bing would drive over Google's corpse within hours.

Google, reeling from a stock crash, would apologize and back out the policy.

Some portion of advertisers and users would never return.

Sundar Pichai would be ousted as CEO.


Jul 5, 2015

Could Hitler and the top brass in Germany have avoided execution and long term prison sentences if they had surrendered?

No.

Firstly, the Russians weren't in a prisoner-taking mood. They were in more of a "shoot every German you see in the face" sort of mood.

As for the other allies, consider that Rudolph Hess tried to defect by plane to Scotland. He was given life in prison (being half-crazy may have spared him the gallows.)


Jul 5, 2015

Does the seemingly infinite nature of pi prove, or even suggest, that we are not living in a virtual reality?

That question is entirely meaningless.


Jul 6, 2015

Am I crazy or should President Obama stay out of Texas?

The President should not hesitate to visit any state in the union; any allusion to assassination or risk of assassination may be sensibly construed to be a threat in and of itself.

Such allusions should be avoided for reasons both legal and moral.


Jul 7, 2015

What are some incidents where people took revenge in a mind-blowing way?

Little Joey was a short boy. His alcoholic father beat him once so bad his arm was permanently crippled. He contracted smallpox and it left his face pock-marked.

His classmates relentlessly taunted him, calling him 'pocky'.

They weren't laughing when he changed his last name to Stalin and executed at least a half million people.


Jul 7, 2015

If all creatures on Earth have some positive impact on the environment, what is our "good" impact on Earth as humans?

Where did you ever get the idea that all creatures have a positive impact on the environment?

When oxygen-exhaling life first appeared, it was a mass-extinction event, called (among other things) The Oxygen Catastrophe (Great Oxygenation Event).

In addition to killing just about everything, it triggered the worst ice-age ever, where glaciers came all the way to the equator to create a "snowball earth". Huronian glaciation

Negative impact on the environment : Earth covered in ice due to O2 exhaling critters.

And then there's these restless little monkeys called Homo Sapiens which kicked off a mass extinction of their own : The Sixth Great Extinction is Underway—and Guess Which Big-Brained Species is to Blame

So, being good for the environment is definitely not a prerequisite for life.


Jul 7, 2015

How do I get guys to like me? I try my hardest but I'm too shy and have to wait until guys talk to me.

Make eye-contact, smile slightly, look away. This is sometimes called "eye tag".
Wait, look at him again, until he looks back, look away again.

You have just given him non verbal permission to approach you and strike up a conversation.

This dynamic is on display in the movie The Imitation Game.

"What was that?"
"That is called flirting."


Jul 8, 2015

What do you think about a 50-year-old man who is going out with a 17-year-old girl?

"Will the defendant please rise ..."


Jul 8, 2015

Why is the word "singularity" used to describe things beyond human technological advancement?

A singularity isn't something beyond technical advancement, it comes from mathematics. It means an exception.

Consider the simple function f(x) = 1/x.


It's easy to calculate for any x. Except when x=0. At that point, it looks like infinity. Or ... negative infinity. Oh hell, we can't tell what it is. We leave it undefined.

So we have a singularity at x=0, where in this single instance the function does something totally unique.

In physics the classic singularity is the black hole. The math behind the black hole is very similar to the simple function above. (Imagine the lower half, spun around.)


Every point in space is behaving itself, has a known curvature, distance from other points, etc. Except that damn point right in the center. We don't know what to do with it, mathematically.

Physical events may also be singularities. Like the big bang. There is no space, all mass-energy is compressed into a point, there is no moment prior to it - it breaks all the rules. Singularity.

We may extend the term metaphorically to human affairs. For instance, the taming of fire may be called a singularity in that human life was vastly different before and after (surviving cold, cooking meat, eventually making metal.) When we use the term this way, we're being a little loose with it. This is not a singularity in the sense of a black hole where this one single point bears no relation at all to a normal point. We're just emphasizing how big of an impact the event had, compared to a typical tuesday.

It's all in good fun (and can be a handy oversimplification.) Just ask this guy :


Jul 9, 2015

Why most of the most novel and important mathematical discoveries were conceived before the 24th year of age of their discoverer?

A great mystery, with notable exceptions but nonetheless undeniable.

I would guess that innovation shines brightest when knowledge is first forming.
In the mind of a student, not a master.

The innovator needs to know enough to be at the edge of knowledge; but I posit that it is in the approach to this boundry that the miracle of genius may strike. The student is learning in his own way. Along their unique, uncertain path they are most likely to step off and find a new path, higher than any before seen.


Jul 9, 2015

Did Nazi Germany lose WW2 primarily because it invaded the USSR and declared war on the US? Had it done neither, could it have triumphed? Would the world today be very different, with Europe, Africa and parts of Asia comprising a German reich?

Pretty much.

Hitler himself said in his ‘Last Testament’ that he regretted declaring war on the USA. Doing so was of no strategic benefit and awakened a massive industrial arsenal for the Allies.

At the Nuremberg trials Goering reported how losing the battle of Stalingrad broke Hitler. He said, "You must understand. There were really two Hitlers. One before the defeat at Stalingrad, and another after." Once Stalingrad was lost, Hitler became increasingly dependent on amphetamines, paranoid and irrational. When the Eastern front begged for reinforcements or supplies he would respond "The Eastern Front must take care of itself." He simply wouldn't accept the fact the Red Army was executing a massive, menacing advance on Germany.

Psychology aside, the Soviet Union had vast reserves of men and fuel. And Stalin was as bat-shit insane as Hitler.

All this aside, however, we must remember one over-riding fact. Roosevelt had set in motion the Manhattan Project as early as 1939, when he created the Advisory Committee on Uranium. The committee reported back that uranium "would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known."

In June of 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807 which created the innocuous-sounding Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), tasked with trying to build the bomb (The Manhattan Project.)

This was before Pearl Harbor and before Germany's declaration of war. So the US would have built the bomb anyway.

In 1945 there is no doubt the United States would have unleashed a devastating nuclear assault on The Third Reich.

So there was no historical path to victory for Germany. To borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, "The moment was not structured that way."


Jul 9, 2015

How did people store fresh milk in 1700s colonial America and in 1800s frontier America?

People stored it in this contraption :


Families kept their own milk-cows or got morning deliveries from local dairy farms.


Jul 9, 2015

What evidence suggests that dinosaurs were abruptly killed by an asteroid hitting the earth years ago?

(Edit 7/1//2015 - thanks to readers for pointing out multiple factual errors in the original version of this answer. I have made corrections.)

The evidence is fairly recent, and beyond suggesting an asteroid impact it is pretty conclusive.

Dinosaurs abruptly disappear in the fossil record. You can easily see it:

Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.

Below - dinosaurs. Above - no dinosaurs. Radiologically dated to 65 million years ago. So the dinosaurs left in a hurry.

OK, but how do we know it was a meteor? First of all - see that white layer?
It's chock-full of this weird stuff called iridium.

Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant metal, and maybe the most dense.
It is one of the rarest elements on Earth (the crust anyway) - gold is 40 times more common.

On Earth. Iridium is much more abundant in meteors.

OK, so a bunch of iridium appeared on earth at the same time the dinosaurs vanished. That's pretty good evidence for death-due-to-meteor, but not conclusive.
Stay tuned.

Next we have shocked quartz.

This stuff is formed when quartz is hit really, really hard. As in nuclear-bomb hard. Meteor impact hard.

While 65 million-year-old iridium is found all over the globe, the shocked quartz was found in a specific location.

A meteor crater. A really, really, big meteor crater. A crater 110 miles (180 km) wide.
Created 65 million years ago, by a meteor the size of Mount Everest. The impact released the energy of a 100 tera-ton nuclear bomb. This would have ignited the entire atmosphere, caused mega-tsunamis and finally an ice age. Surface temperatures world-wide remained at 300 degrees F (150 °C) for at least several hours.

Any creature not underwater, underground, or in some kind of shelter would have been killed.

The crater is called Chicxulub off the coast of Mexico.

Computer simulation of impact at Chicxulub.

Chicxulub crater, 110 miles wide and 12 miles deep.

Here is a great documentary about this extinction event on Youtube -

The Last Day of the Dinosaurs, National Geographic.


Jul 9, 2015

Why can't I stop drinking after 1 beer?

I can't tell you why. But I can tell you how.

Stop at zero.


Jul 9, 2015

Should churches be forced to marry two gay people?

The recent SCOTUS decision doesn't require churches to do anything.

It declares that the state and federal governments must recognize gay marriages. It requires no church to perform them. The gov't doesn't even recognize any church per the 1st amendment.

So your church is free to marry them or not. A gay couple is free to get married in a gay-friendly church or in a secular fashion at town hall.

Everybody gets what they want. I happen to think you're a bigot. You think I'm a heretic. That's OK.

Let freedom ring.


Jul 11, 2015

If Walmart can refuse to sell prepaid class rings with the Confederate flag, why is a bakery being fined for not making a pro-LGBT cake?

The bakery wasn't fined for refusing to bake the cake.

It was fined for divulging personal details (street address) of the couple to the public.

See: Oregon bakers forced to pay $135,000 after sharing lesbian couple’s home address


Jul 11, 2015

Why is no genuine dialogue and no social contract possible with the Jews?

Cuz we're from outer space and just keeping you guys around as zoo specimens ...


Jul 11, 2015

What would happen if the law of gravity becomes ~1/r instead of ~1/r² for 60 seconds?

You'd barely notice, except that every star in the Cosmos would implode, then explode - if not immediately, then 60 seconds later when the inverse square law turned back on.

Along with the super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies.

I wouldn't try it if I were you ...


Jul 11, 2015

What shall I wear to my girlfriend's graduation?

Suit up per her instructions and add a tie.

Don't invade Russia. (Some battles are not meant to be fought.)


Jul 12, 2015

Why was this question removed: "Do Japanese guys find themselves uglier than the white races"?

Moderators use their discretion without providing justification to the user (it's not a debate, it's a decision.)

The moderator found this question offensive to Japanese men (I happen to agree) and made the call.

What if the moderator's wrong? Could be. So what ? They do their best and move on, so should you. In all the universe, don't you have any other questions to ask ?


Jul 12, 2015

When the machines take over, what monument will they build?

I can think of no better design depicting the conquest of machine over humanity than this one (artist unknown) :


Jul 14, 2015

Have any elected politicians since Thomas Jefferson claimed to have seen a UFO?

We can add Jimmy Carter to the list :

Jimmy Carter's describes his UFO experience on Larry King :
Page on youtube.com


Jul 14, 2015

Is it only men that have to register for the Selective Service no longer than 30 days after their 18th birthday or women too?

Only men in the US.

Selective Service System


Jul 14, 2015

Why did fascism emerge in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s?

Fascism started in Italy and spread to Germany.

It was sparked by :

High unemployment (1921 in Italy and 1932 in Germany.)

Destabilized government in the wake of WW I. Both countries were at the mercy of factional strife, coups, and street fighting.

Fear of Communism. When the Communists came to power in Russia, they executed Tsar Nicholas II, cruelly bayoneting his daughters. This sent a chill down every royal spine in Europe (many of whom were related to Nicholas.) The wealthy also feared for their power and riches. Communists were active in both countries, trying to get themselves elected or take the government by force. Both Mussolini and Hitler exploited this fear to secure help from the wealthy and powerful.

Wounded national pride in the wake of WW I. Although Italy was among the victors of WW I, it was quickly marginalized by the other victors. It received none of the spoils of war and no voice in the armistice. Germany of course lost the war, much territory, and had to endure the Treaty of Versailles which inflicted total blame and financial reparations.

Many war veterans from WWI. The streets were full of experienced soldiers, jobless, often still armed. They were ripe to be organized against other political parties. Political disputes often spilled over to gunfire in the streets. These conditions favored the most ruthless political party.


Jul 17, 2015

How does one handle wounds on the skin?

After you clean it with water (and soap if necessary - flush well with more water after), you should disinfect with an aggressive disinfectant like alcohol or peroxide (warn your patient-friend it's going to sting.) Be sure to disinfect your own hands first.

Then you should bandage it and change the bandage every day or if there blood seeps through. If the wound persists in bleeding take him/her to the ER.


Jul 17, 2015

What is the best, most commonly used evidence to support the theory of evolution?

We can see it happening. It's especially evident in creatures that mature and reproduce very quickly, like insects (or microbes). This can be very pesky.

See this thing?

It's called the Colorado potato beetle. Do you know what it eats? You guessed it, potato plants. It strips them bare.

50 years ago, you could kill it by spraying with most any insecticide. Which, for potatoes is especially handy since we don't eat the part of the plant above ground.

So DDT killed it. Cyanide killed it. Nicotine killed it.

Then it quickly evolved. DDT wouldn't kill it. Cyanide wouldn't kill it. Nicotine wouldn't kill it.

This beetle actually played a major role in launching the pesticide industry, as new pesticides had to be invented almost annually to combat this beetle's ability to evolve resistance.

The result of 50 years of this is that the beetle is now resistant to 52 different compounds belonging to all major insecticide classes.

We still can't kill the damn thing.


Jul 17, 2015

Is it normal to be told to lie in a technology job? I work for a "successful" multi-billion dollar technology company known for acquisitions and for a federal lawsuit. I was given a script to recite to a customer, and listened to as I delivered it.

This is chilling, bizarre, and downright frightening.

This type of control and corruption is unheard of in normal business. It almost feels like a cult.

Be aware :

By having lied to customers, you have committed fraud. And these managers listened to you do it. Now these managers can blackmail you.

Guys like this won't hesitate to throw you to the wolves at their first convenience. You mentioned some executives have already been arrested. You run the risk of being set up and framed.

In short, for your own legal protection, you should not go to work tomorrow. You should contact a lawyer and take whatever action necessary to protect yourself. Note that you qualify for at least an unemployment claim, and you may even be able to sue them (personally I wouldn't - just walk away.)

Even in the military, a soldier must only follow the *lawful* orders of their commander, else they are personally liable.


Jul 17, 2015

Why didn't the D-Day landings start at night?

Good answers here, I would only add/summarize :

Back then (before night vision), darkness favored the defender, for the simple reason the defender doesn't have to move. He can hunker down in a bunker or just take cover in a bush, lighting up the attacker with flares.

The attacker is totally exposed, can't see where he's going or obstacles like barbed wire, etc. He cant see what he's shooting at and can't find cover. He can be totally blinded by shining a spot-light on him.


Jul 17, 2015

Why is Godel considered the greatest logician of the modern era just for 1 achievement?

Godel's central theorem threw off a lot of other important results (the Axiom of Choice, etc ...) but had he only done the incompleteness theorem, he would still be considered not only the greatest logician, but possibly the greatest mathematician. Professional mathematicians, in my experience, most often cite his work as the most beautiful and profound work in mathematics ever.

It has the following features :

It’s a hugely unexpected surprise. When you explain it to people, they tend not to believe you.

Once you understand it, it seems like a totally obvious non-surprise. Very few discoveries are so bizarre to first behold, yet so natural in retrospect. To understand it, you go through this abrupt transition, which feels like a dizzying burst of light.

It’s subject matter is of maximum importance : The limits of mathematical reasoning.

The proof itself is very, very elegant.

The proof throws off dozens of hugely important results like the Church-Turing thesis, the Axiom of Choice, etc.

Godel’s theorem is nothing short of an intellectual earthquake. It is perhaps without any rival in all of human history.

There's a PBS documentary on mathematics where they go around with room with some major math luminaries asking what work they find the most beautiful, and they all chime in, "Godel's theorem." I can't find it, perhaps a reader can help ...


Jul 17, 2015

What are the biased and unbiased facts of smoking in public?

I used to smoke. For 30 years. Er, 35.

I could smoke in high school, within the rules (if you can imagine that.) I could smoke inside buildings in college.

Slowly the smoking bans took effect. Not inside any public buildings. Or restaurants. Or bars. You had to stop what you were doing and step outside.

This was especially poignant in winter.

It made smoking a pain. It was just inconvenient as hell. Finally I had a job in a sky-scraper, and it took 20 mins to descend and exit the whole complex. In frustration I bought an electronic cigarette.

I found that more convenient, and eventually came to prefer it. I looked in my back-pack one day, and there was an untouched pack of cigarettes 3 weeks old. I threw it away and never smoked again. That was a year ago. Not once have I missed it.

So, here is one smoker that greatly benefited from the smoking bans. (Curse them at the time though I did.)


Jul 19, 2015

Do men from the corporate background think and plan in detail to maintain an efficient work-life balance?

No.

There is no "work-life balance" in the tech sector, and many other sectors of the economy. There never has been.

Just look at the phrase. "Work-life balance." A 20th century phrase if ever there was one. It sounds so wonderful. And placid, like a Yoga class.

And total bullshit. We wouldn't need the phrase in the first place unless there was a widespread lack of personal time.

Modern society requires too many hours. We need to fix that. It doesn't need a catch-phrase. If you must have one, let it be "shorter work hours." Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's

We don't need a "work-life balance."

We need vibrant lives.


Jul 19, 2015

Bill Gates says software bots will eventually take jobs away in 20 years. What do people think?

From "640 KRam ought to be enough for anybody" to disregarding the World Wide Web to laughing at the pricey iPhone 1.0 ... Bill Gates is one of the least prescient major tech figures on the planet.

As others have pointed out, these "bots" (!?) already exist in the form of algorithms on the back-end of the web. They came 20 years in our past, not our future.

They continue to evolve.


Jul 19, 2015

What effect would limxcf(x)=f(c) have on physics?

It means we do not have Special Relativity (and presumably Newtonian Mechanics holds.)

'c' is the speed of light. A whole bunch of functions break down at speed=c. For example, consider the kinetic energy of a particle with mass>0, moving at speed x.

Call it Ke(x).

Ke at the speed of light, Ke(c) is undefined.

the limit as x->c is infinite.


Jul 19, 2015

How is the value of e determined in maths?

There are many formulae for it, I find this one simplest to remember and prettiest. It also converges quickly :


Jul 20, 2015

How do atheists view the heart on Pluto, if not as a sign from God to live with love and peace?

Our eyes (and the brains attached) are pattern recognizers. They have evolved to see through optical noise to recognize objects. Here is pure noise; we can't do much with that :


We are social hunters. We're looking for people, food, water, materials to build.
Innumerable images hit our eyeballs and our search algorithms go to work on each one. Over time, with 7 billion people on the job and many images pouring in, we arrive at some impressive coincidences.

There's a face on Mars! Holy crap! Aliens!


Accident of light and shadow. Here's the same face, at higher res, from a different angle :


Then there are deliberate hoaxes. "Dude! Jesus is on my toast !!!"


"Cool! I got Elvis on mine!"


It is, I think, safe to say that God would not communicate to us via dubious images on toast or on Mars. As for the heart shape on Pluto, that thing is barely recognizable as such.

Trust me on the elvis toast though.


Jul 20, 2015

Where can I sell my liver?

There are thriving black-markets for organs in Germany and East Asia.

Make sure they throw in a casket and headstone. The liver is not exactly optional.


Jul 20, 2015

What should I do with my childish boyfriend? My boyfriend is really childish sometimes, he believes “an eye for an eye.” For example if I didn't answer him for 20 minutes, he will not answer me for exactly 20 minutes.

"Above all else, in human relations, remember this : reciprocity." -- anon

An eye-for-an-eye is only a problem if you pluck people's eyes out. So don't do that.

10 days ago you broke up with him and didn't talk to him for a week. Yet you say you hate it when he disappears. Don't do that.

Be as kind, authentic, and forgiving as you want him to be. Don't act out on anger in destructive ways.

If he reciprocates, problem solved. If he doesn't, find someone who will.

But above all, become that person first.

(You guys are probably toast at this point, btw. The cycle of mutual recriminations, once started, rarely comes to rest.)


Jul 20, 2015

Does anybody else think today should be a world holiday?

That's a nice idea.

The World has lost a bit of the wonder and yearning we had during the early space program, the "age of aquarius".

It would be nice to have a day when we celebrate our astronauts, past and present. It may help re-invigorate space exploration.


Jul 21, 2015

Why do puppies swarm?

Many "puppy" mammals do this. The reason is safety.

Wolf/Dog pups are defenseless - which is bad enough. If they went scattering in all directions their parents couldn't protect them.

They sleep together, eat together, play together, and instinctively stay within sight of a trusted adult.


Jul 21, 2015

I asked my boyfriend to fight for me, and he refused. Does that mean he doesn't really care that much about me? Was he being a coward, or am I judging him too harshly?

You ... have never been in a fight. Had fists hit full force on your face, breaking bones, cartilage, skin. Had to hit another human being so hard he could not get up.
Seen blood on your shirt and not know whose it is.

There's no such thing as "just say something." You walk away, or fight to win. That means violence, an uncertain outcome. and somebody may go to jail.

It is never the veteran who cries for war.


Jul 21, 2015

Why do I have pain under my left rib cage after eating?

Well, that's probably your stomach :


The cause of pain could be anything : over-eating, eating too fast, acid reflux, ulcer, even spices could do it.

If it bothers I'd have a doctor take a look due the very broad set of possible causes. There are various non-intrusive scans available to get a good look at these organs.
If that turns up nothing, there is a simple procedure where they use a camera to go down in there for a close look.


Jul 22, 2015

Are chain restaurants declining in the United States? If so, why?

Yes, they are.

247wallstreet(.com) compiled data from Technomic is a research and consulting firm servicing the food and foodservice industry. They present their results here :

America’s Disappearing Restaurant Chains


24/7 Wall St. reviewed data provided by food industry consulting and research firm Technomic to determine the 10 large restaurant chains with the biggest decline in locations and sales between 2002 and 2012. Notably, Bennigan’s sales plunged by more than 90% between 2002 and 2012. In 2002, there were 1,688 TCBY’s in the U.S. As of last year, there were just 500.


Why? We have to use a bit of guesswork.

Firstly, all restaurants took a hit from the Great Recession. Eating out is among the first expense families cut when money is tight.

Secondly, chains aren't as good. They are attached to a huge supply chain and stagnant menu. The ingredients are not as likely to be fresh. There is no head chef constantly tweaking the menu and serving up specials. There is no way that a regular diner can be given, say, a sample plate of a new dish. A drink on the house.

It is homogeneous, impersonal and repetitive. That's not a good thing for the dining experience.

I like to relate this tale about chain restaurants. I used to live in coastal Connecticut. A Red Lobster opened up in New London.

It was a late summer day. Lobsters were pouring in to the state from our own lobster traps, and from neighboring New England states. The supermarkets were stuffed to the rafters with cheap lobster. There was such a surplus, even some gas stations had put in lobster tanks!

So I go to Red Lobster. I ask about the lobster. They say they have no lobster.

I offered, "It's the height of the lobster season. This isn't Boise, you can smell the ocean from here. An 1/8 of a mile south, you can buy dozens of lobsters at a supermarket. You can get more over the bridge in Groton. Hell, I tihnk there are lobster boats unloading right now at the pier."

I am informed they have their own lobster supply that comes in trucks. I countered, "Or not. Do you know why you are out of lobster?"

(blank look.)

"Because New Englanders love lobster and ate it all! And there's lobsters everywhere - seriously, check out the gas station. I mean, 'Lobster' is in your *name*."

The manager just gave me a defeated shrug which seemed to say, "Big, dumb company. I'm just doin my job, man."

So I bolted. Headed over the bridge to Noank. There's a place there that tourists can't find; it's nestled in the hills near the beach. Called Abbotts. Seaside dining but nothing fancy. self serve on picnic tables. They never run out of lobster. Rather than a tank they have a huge submerged netting roping off a chunk of the ocean to store their critters.



A good many of their patrons pull in by boat.

Yum!

So, for restaurants, being responsive matters. An internal "shortage" is actually a spike in sales. So you hussle to keep up. Culture also matters. You don't run out of lobster in late summer in coastal Connecticut when the diner has walked past full lobster tanks all day.

Abbott's has never run out of lobster. Ever. I guarantee if their supply ran low, they would notice at the half-way mark and be out loading up a truck or two with lobsters.

It's no chain, it doesn't want to grow, you can't buy a franchise. There is only one Abbotts, very hard to find.

It's still there. The Red Lobster isn't.


Jul 22, 2015

Is it completely possible that a nuclear attack from one nation would cause the attacked nation to retaliate in equal force and lead to global nuclear winter?

Assuming it were a nation with an adequate ability to retaliate :

It is possible but not likely the attacked nation would respond in equal force. A massive, nation-killing retaliatory strike is more likely. I state this for a couple of reasons :

The goal of the response would be to destroy the attacker. Completely.

The "fog of war" would reach new heights in a nuclear conflict. Communications systems would get all screwed up, the government would scatter, it would likely be some time before we even knew which leaders were alive.

There would be wide-spread panic. People would insist the attacker be annhilated. Anything short of this risks a military coup d'etat, even in the most stable of nations.


Having said all that, it wouldn't the Cold War scenario of 30,000-40,000 warheads going off simultaneously. It would be more like 500-1000. That wouldn't create a nuclear winter.


Jul 22, 2015

How do some people afford to travel so often if they are not wealthy?

Here in the US, salaries are higher and plane fares can be just be just a couple hundred bucks, coast to coast. You just to plan ahead. And in this vast country, flying is actually cheaper than train or driving.

I can't speak to international flight, but suppose a guy from India takes a software developer job here. He's going to make about 80K right out of school. He can easily put aside $2,000 for travel to and from home.


Jul 22, 2015

What are some summer study/research programs for women studying mathematics in undergrad and grad school in addition to other special opportunities to promote the study of math for women?

Um, what ?

Every mathematics course of study at every university.

While mathematics is admittedly the sexiest of subjects, it went co-ed a long time ago.


Jul 23, 2015

What are the best things non-tech people can say to tech people to convince them to join a tech startup?

I'm assuming you don't have any money to pay them.

In which case, you have to approach them exactly like they were investors. You are asking them to invest their time in your venture, with a low probability of high return.

So - Don't talk down to them. You have an idea, but you're broke and can't code.
They will not be your employees. You will not be setting their agenda.

Show them you know what you're doing. You have made contacts with investors and are making new contacts every week. You hope to have a Minimal Viable Product by a certain date, in order to validate the market for your idea. If that test fails, you are prepared to quit or pivot. You have a plan for growth.

Listen to their feedback as an equal, not a functionary. Maybe your MVP can't be done in the given time, but a subset of features is the real Minimal Product. Maybe your idea is hard to distinguish from another one that's already up and running; you'll have to adjust to remedy that.

Is this your first time founding a startup? Because it's not his/her first time coding. If so - is anyone in the company experienced? Do you have a mentor? How do you plan to compensate for your lack of experience?

Avoid these mistakes :

Don't ask them to sign an NDA. You can't protect your idea contractually. Nobody signs NDAs anymore.

Don't worry about a patent. If you must, file a provisional patent application, but do it over one weekend at most.

Don't over-design your MVP or completely define it before coding. Let it evolve a bit, Agile style.


As they said in Ancient Rome, "conquer by stooping."


Jul 23, 2015

Considering all the good that labor unions have done for the USA why is there so much animosity toward them?

Unions form a monopoly on labor. They force the employer not to hire outside their union, sealing the monopoly. Now bad employees are impossible to fire. Now the union can artificially drive up the cost of labor, since there is no competition. The employer is paying more for less productivity.

This cost, both in the form of higher price and lower quality, is passed straight to the consumer.

The consumer refuses to pay it. The union has no control over foreign manufacturers. The consumer, who just wants the most for their money, buys a foreign product.

The investor bails too. Most big manufacturers are publically traded. Fewer investors are willing to take a long position in a company which isn't competing well with foreign offerings.

Now sales are off and the company can't raise as much capital. Layoff time. The union workers had it sweet in the beginning, but sorry buddy - here's your pink slip.

The manufacturer opens up a new factory in Mexico to try to regain their competitiveness.

Note that the whole purpose of the union was to secure better pay and benefits to the worker. Now he's jobless. The whole sector of the economy has been weakened. The factory he worked at is shuttered and all those jobs jumped the border, never to return. Consumers lose. Investors lose. Business owners lose. Employees lose. (Mexico is pretty happy though.)

This is, in miniature, a brief history of the US automobile industry.

The unions also become corrupt and aligned with organized crime (they know a good scam when they see it), but that's another story.


Jul 23, 2015

What currently living species would thrive in a coming Ice Age?

Almost all of them.

We have been in an ice age for 3 million years. I know, doesn't feel like it. We are currently in an "interglacial period" - a brief respite from the cold and ice. Interglacials last about 15,000 years and occur about every 100,000.

All the creatures you see on earth have been withstanding ice-age conditions, for most of the time, for 3 million years. We're all veterans of this ice age thing.

Creatures who couldn't handle it/adapt died off a long, long time ago.


Jul 25, 2015

What are the possible upsides and downsides of Quora credits having been eliminated (July 2015)?

Edit : (9/14/2015) My answer-views and upvotes have now increased since this change, so color me super-happy.

Edit : (9/8/2015) After a couple weeks, I am completely flipping my position on this.


So my concerns (below the break), it turns out, did not materialize. I surrender the hill entirely.

There has only been a slight dip in my viewership (20% tops) since I have been unable to promote. I'm still getting lots of views. And I wrote a bit less.


There may be a slight drop, but these views are more valuable to me because they were gained organically, rather than me forced into people's feeds.

Yesterday I wrote a quick-ish answer here, and it got 6,000 views - Christopher Reiss's answer to What are some of the most devious military strategies that have been used in wars of the past?

So Marc Bodnick's assurances are certainly validated in my case; it appears the Promote system was creating enough noise that it wasn't effective anyway. And it's more gratifying not to have to promote at all.

Thanks, Quora team, for continuing to provide me an audience for my writing.


(Original post - 7/2015)

I've recently hit pause, for the most part, on my writing. And I really enjoyed writing here.

I'm not angry. There's just no sense playing to an empty room.

Let me explain. Some answers I write are on some pretty obscure topics. The reason I answer them is that I try to give a larger answer than the questioner expects. Other answers I have put a lot of work into (over an hour for free is a lot in my book.) In both cases having very few viewers means I just wasted my time. I can get two views in a coffee shop. I don't need Quora for that.

An example, a post I wrote about the durability of Nokia phones went viral and got 11,000 upvotes. Now, nobody would have seen it in the first place had I not given it a small promotion first. Who cares about Nokia phones? I'm really talking about the culture that created them. Without promote to just a couple hundred people, it would not have eventually gotten 11,000 upvotes and 200,000 views.

Christopher Reiss's answer to Why are Nokia phones stereotyped as being indestructible?

A meritocracy is not a level playing field. If you work hard, go to a top school, get involved in a startup which goes on to conquer the world, cash out for a nice sum of money - you're treated differently. You can get investors and press on the phone. You can have lunch with powerful people. You can move in to their neighborhoods.

It's not about guaranteed results. It's just about opportunity. Successful people have earned the right to more opportunity.

And that's all that credits did. All they give you is views. Opportunity. If your content sucked, you wouldn't get views beyond the promotion. You wouldn't get upvotes.

I got almost a million views this month (so far) on old answers. Because the stuff got upvoted, because it got seen way back.

It's as if Quora no longer has a memory. Today you may rock and fill a stadium. Your next gig is still in the corner of a Starbuck's.

I don't mind writing for nothing.

I can't bring myself to write for no one, in the hopes that some secret algorithm gives me a chance.

I've already earned a chance.


Jul 26, 2015

How prevalent is the notion that the US Supreme Court, an appointed body, should not make decisions that contradict the will of the people and their elected representatives?

It's quite common to raise this objection in American politics, but so common it's clearly disingenuous.

Each party has been accusing the other of 'stacking' the Supreme Court since forever. Yet nobody has ever made a move to abolish it.

It is true that enormous power is vested in the court. Their word is final. They do not stand for election and their appointment is for life. Some political-science types say that it is too much power - unchecked power at that.

However. The founding fathers had amazing foresight in crafting our government. Once these Judges are appointed, they are beholden to no party. They will keep their seat long after the president that nominated them is gone. They will never run for re-election.

Their only job is to interpret the Constitution. They are removed from the turbulence of daily politics and are truly free to follow their conscience. They answer not to the headlines, but to history.

This 'historic' view exists nowhere else in American politics. And they tend to make the right call, according to the long arc of history. Reproduction rights, civil rights, marriage rights, etc.

They may not get it right every time, but they are the only political body empowered to make the effort without any external influence.


Jul 26, 2015

What is the CONCEPTUAL explanation for how you divide one fraction by another?

Dividing by A/B is the same as multiplying by B, then dividing by A.


Jul 26, 2015

Why do we die?

There is evolutionary pressure to do so.

Imagine if early hominids were immortal. They would hang around. not evolving, eating food and consuming other resources. The population would grow without bound as more are born, but the only deaths are 'unnatural causes.'

1,000 miles away is another group of hominids, but they only live 40 years. Their brains are getting bigger. Before you know it they have complex language and weapon-making. Nobody in the population is over 50. No 'technical debt', so to speak (obsolete old timers.) Only new models.

Eventually the mortal, evolving hominids invade the immortals and kill them off with advanced weapons, communication, and other manifestations of intelligence.


Aug 3, 2015

How do I help someone in giving up his smoking habit?

Nicotine Replacement Therapy tools (like nicotine gum, patch, lozenges) are usually for sale to ages of 18 or over. Joining a support group also helps. There is also prescription medication like Chantix.

But you say your friend is a teenager. None of these options are going to be easily available on his/her own.

By far the easiest choice is to take them to see a doctor. The doctor will be able to make age exceptions for Nicotine Replacement Therapies, can direct them to support groups and may even try a prescription like Chantix.

The doctor will most likely be delighted that someone is coming in at a young age - before major health problems arise - and seeking to stop.


Aug 3, 2015

My daughter made out with her boyfriend in a movie theater. She doesn't know that I know. What is the best way to confront and punish her about it?

Heh. Um. Ahem.

Stop creeping around your daughter like the Gestapo. It's bad for you, bad for her, bad for the boy - it's just bad.

It's quite normal for a 16 year old girl to kiss a boy on a date. Get over it.

Remember your daughter is not your property, like a cactus. You do not possess her. She is a person. She belongs to herself. (So does the cactus, but that's besides the point.)

Did I mention stop creeping around like the Gestapo?

Buy your daughter a gift certificate for a free dinner for two at a nice restaurant and a movie for two. And don't go anywhere near either place.


Aug 5, 2015

Would Jews eat a man alive if he were covered in marmalade?

Um. Well.

Wow.

It's never come up before, actually.


Aug 6, 2015

Now at the age of 23 I've already accomplished so much and know more than my friends that just graduated with degrees. Why do they resent me? Is it because I was meant to be left behind?

I will answer your question, by rearranging the words in it, to pose the real questions which I believe are at the heart of your feelings.

"Now at the age of 23, my friends just graduated with degrees.
Was I meant to be left behind? Do they know more than me? Did I accomplish enough not to resent them?"

Aug 6, 2015

Most historians agree it was wrong was that made Germany solely responsible for the WW1 and that punish unjust, have inevitably led to the ww2 .So it was in fact only one war with non-disruptive. Should Germany not then be officially rehabilitated?

Yes, the two World Wars can be seen as a single war with one interruption (and the cold war a continued bickering over terms by the victors.)

Germany has been officially rehabilitated. In the first two years after its surrender, Germany was essentially pillaged and looted for "reparations" and to reduce it to a mostly agrarian, "de-nazified" state.

However, by 1947 this attitude toward Germany had changed, especially as the Cold War gained steam and the allies realized that Germany could play an important role in the standoff.

By 1948 the Deutsche Mark was reintroduced into Germany. By 1952 14 Billion dollars had been lent to West Germany.

By the mid fifties the German economy was booming again. It was home critical NATO military bases and once again an industrial power-house to the west.

Of course, East Germany would languish under Soviet Rule until the 90's when Germany was finally reunified.

Today Germany pays no reparations and enjoys "most favored nation" status. Like Japan and Italy, it is redeemed, rebuilt, and stronger than ever.

And like Japan and Italy, it tends to be pacificist as hell, compared to other advanced nations.

Funny, that.


Aug 7, 2015

Why am I able to be really smart for just a few minutes, but then I get tired?

I once wrote a piece of code.

It was subtle and complex. It was a pattern recognizer for a computer language. The syntax was totally programmable. Given an unknown pile of syntactical rules and an unknown program, my algorithm figured out how to parse and execute the code.

My comment at the top was as follows : "I only understood this long enough to write it. If you can figure it out, please explain it to me."

Mental work is a bit like surfing. Every now and then a perfect wave comes in and you are sailing to shore like some sea-borne god.

Rarely. Most of the time you are just splashing around with the other soggy mortals.


Aug 7, 2015

Can mathematics prove the existence of God or intelligent design?

There have been attempts, most notably by Kurt Godel. Gödel's ontological proof

His proof is of note for two opposing reasons; Godel made one of the (possibly the most) important discovery in mathematics (the Incompleteness Theorem) and he was also pretty much insane in the latter period of his life when he penned this proof.

His proof is descended from St. Anselm's Ontological proof (1078 AD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

Neither proof is considered a 'proof' in the indisputable, mathematical sense. To sketch Anselm's essential argument,

God is infinite. Nothing greater can be conceived.

If we conceive of God, we cannot conceive of Him being fictitious. For that would be less than a real God; yet nothing greater can be conceived (by 1.)

Therefore God cannot be thought of as not existing. It is logically inconsistent to do so.


Aug 8, 2015

What are some of the most devious military strategies that have been used in wars of the past?

This ancient, sneaky trick echoes today in modern language. You've heard the phrase "parting shot" for an insult delivered as a person is leaving.

It's actually "Parthian shot". The Parthian Empire was in modern day Iran, from about 250BC to 250AD.

The Parthians were exceptionally good horsemen. Their most deadly instrument of battle was the "Cavalry Archer", a horse-mounted soldier with bow-and-arrow. Aiming an arrow on horse-back was an especially tough skill to master, but master it they did.

The Parthian Shot was a trick that laid waste to many an opponent. It was based on a feat which nobody would expect because it's quite hard to do.

The Parthian cavalry archers would pretend to become frightened and retreat. The enemy would give chase on their horses. They usually wouldn't notice that the Parthians are retreating in careful formation.

The Parthians would wait until the enemy was entirely focused on the pursuit, at full gallop, holding tight to their horses. Defenseless.

A horn would blow. In unison, the Parthians would turn their torso backwards while still on their horses and rain arrows upon the enemy. At full gallop.

The enemy had been tricked to believe they are chasing a frightened and retreating army. Often they weren't even aware of the sudden reversal until an arrow struck.

Parthian shot

Once this maneuver had destroyed the enemy cavalry, the Parthians would usually return to the battlefield to encircle and destroy the remaining foot soldiers. From retreat to total victory.


Aug 8, 2015

What decade is considered to be the pinnacle of intellectualism in the U.S?

My vote is 1950-1960. Post-war America was booming, while the rest of the industrialized world was still reeling from war. America began to take the lead on a number of intellectual fronts.

Art : Abstract Expressionism, while begun in the 1940's, gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950's. The center of the art world turned from Paris to New York as this uniquely American movement took hold.

The American artists Arshile Gorky , Franz Kline, Clyfford Still,
Hans Hofmann , Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock became globally prominent.

Untitled painting by Clifford Still

Physics : Freed from the burdens of the Manhattan project, newly energized and organized (with many European immigrants to help out), the most important work in physics began to pour out of the United States. Most notable of all is the theory of Quantum electrodynamics (QED) using Feynman diagrams. This theory describes completely the interactions between electrons and photons, taking into account Special Relativity.

Feynmann Diagram


As David Kaiser writes, "since the middle of the 20th century, theoretical physicists have increasingly turned to this tool to help them undertake critical calculations", and as such "Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics". While the diagrams are applied primarily to quantum field theory, they can also be used in other fields, such as solid-state theory.
-- wikipedia article on Feynman diagram


QED is sometimes jokingly described as the "last thing in physics that was ever finished." While technically first published in 1948 and 1949, it was refined and accepted in the 1950's.

Literature : A distinct new literary style emerged in America which also rose to global prominence - Beat culture. The literary giants which emerged were reacting to post-war America; to the threat of nuclear annihilation, incessant proxy wars with the USSR, consumerism, mass-production. These new writers turned against this society with yearning and angst.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
-- Allen Ginsberg, Howl.


They saw a world which was sterile, suicidal, and banal. In response, they ... Howled.

Some other notable novels of that decade :

(1951)

(1957)

(1959)

And if Art, Literature and Science weren't enough, America also created Rock and Roll in the 1950's

Note : the omission of Ayn Rand is quite deliberate. I would no longer include Rand among intellectuals than I would a hippopotamus among airborne mammals.
.


Aug 11, 2015

What will it take to quantify every natural phenomenon occurring in nature?

We have a couple of roadblocks to this, which render the task forever impossible IMO.

Chaos Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory) , well illustrated in the Butterfly Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) Chaos Theory reveals that "non linear systems" can be "hypersensitive to initial conditions." That is, the flap of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane 60 days later. Such non linear systems abound, from Earth's weather to the motion of the planets (the n-body problem.) To predict farther and farther out, we have to take into account every insanely small and unpredictable input. We have to be able to predict when a butterfly will flap its wings.

The Uncertainty Principle. Subatomic particles don't have precise locations and velocities, rather they exist as probabilistic wave packets. That is, we never really know where an electron is and where it's going.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Godel showed that mathematics is never complete; we are always missing some assumptions. He constructed theorems (called 'G') which are seen to be true but unprovable by any given set of axioms. So if we build a physical machine that terminates if G is true, we have an object whose behavior lies beyond the reach of our mathematics.


Aug 12, 2015

Which test is tougher: the Putnam Mathematical Competition or the IITJEE math section?

The Putnam Exam is tougher given that the median (most common score) is 0/12 or 1/12. (And they're usually math majors.)

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition


Aug 12, 2015

Is a heart rate of 110 beats per minute healthy for someone who is at rest?

No.

Target resting pulse rates :


Aug 14, 2015

What is in vape?

Propylene Glycol, Vegetable Glycerin, possibly a small amount of water, nicotine and flavoring.


Aug 16, 2015

When should a company start seeking out VC funds? Before product launch or after?

No VC will even look at you without a product.


Aug 17, 2015

Why is the sensation the same when you burn yourself with heat and with coldness?

This is a very interesting phenomena.

Human skin has nerves specialized for temperature. They're called thermoreceptors.

Thermoreceptors (depicted at right.)

In addition to touch and pain, we have receptors for both hot and cold.
At cold temperatures ( 68 to 86˚F), only the cold receptor fires. At hotter temperatures ( 86˚F and 104˚F), only the heat receptor fires. Except when it's really hot (> 113˚F). Then the pain receptors, the heat receptors and some of the cold receptors fire.

This is known as paradoxical cold. Scientists haven't settled exactly how and why it happens.

One school of thought believes there was evolutionary pressure to avoid being burnt, so every possible alarm evolved to go off at dangerously high temperatures. (There are many more cold receptors than hot, so it makes sense the cold receptors would be 'recruited' in an emergency.)

However, the majority of scientists believe this to be a simple malfunction of the thermoreceptors - an artifact of anatomy not brought about by evolution. Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist at MIT, has found evidence that pain receptors and cold receptors use the same neural pathways to the brain, so that pain and cold are easily confused. (Thermal touch - Scholarpedia).

Given that skin doesn't get preserved in the fossil record, we may never figure out the origin of this sensory illusion.

Source : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-does-very-hot-water-sometimes-feel-cold-180953532


Aug 17, 2015

Why does no one like a know-it-all?

I have made the acquiantance of perhaps 200 people from Harvard and MIT during my life.

I have never heard one use the term "know-it-all" or an equivalent, nor can I imagine them using it. I can't imagine any very bright, well-informed person using it.

Bluntly, "know-it-all" is code for "person who just corrected me and I don't like it." It's anti-intellectualism, pure and simple.

The more effort you make to know what you're talking about - magically - the fewer "know-it-alls" you will encounter. The only thing worse than resenting a weakness in another is resenting a weakness in yourself.


Aug 19, 2015

If the news says something is true, does that mean that it is true, no matter how ridiculous it sounds?

No. In fact, the news media almost always prints critical errors or misleading information. And sometimes, they just get the whole story totally wrong :


(That's the victorious Truman holding the paper up.)


Aug 19, 2015

What is the best brand to buy if I want to start smoking?

Definitely start with a menthol. Menthol acts to block pain. Scientists aren't exactly sure how.

This paper from the National Center for Biotechnology Information claims that menthol may block voltage-gated sodium ion channels in dorsal root ganglion neurons. Whatever the hell that means.

Reference : Menthol pain relief through cumulative inactivation of voltage-gated sodium channels.

However menthol blocks pain, that's going to be of enormous help as a new smoker. Cigarette smoke immediately attacks and damages your mouth, throat and lungs.

For instance, your throat has got all these little hairs called Cilia.

These hairs beat in unison to sweep foreign matter and mucus up from your lungs. So your respiratory system is self-cleaning.

At the first inhale of cigarette smoke, these cilia start beating slower. As you continue to smoke, they become paralyzed. Eventually they just disappear. This leaves you with a hacking cough - the only way to dispel mucus. Which has increased enormously as the lungs try to rid themselves of tar.

None of these sensations are pleasant : the initial irritation of the tissue, the hacking cough. Menthol will help make your transition to smoking less painful.

The loss of cilia and increased mucus lay the groundwork for emphysema. Breathing becomes more difficult and your lungs are more vulnerable to foreign pathogens. Having menthol as a respiratory pain-killer is going to come in very handy.

Then there are changes at the cellular level in your new life as a smoker. Cells in the bronchial lining begin to divide faster. They take the place of the cells that had cilia (remember those?) They mutate. The nuclei have extra chromosomes.

Eventually, they may break through the basement membrane into the lungs, where they divide uncontrollably. That's called a tumor. You will now be one of the 80% of Lung Cancer cases caused by smoking.

Lung cancer is extremely painful, I'm afraid, and mere menthol won't do the trick. Powerful opiate painkillers like OxyContin will be prescribed for the remainder of your life (less than 5 years in 87% of the cases.)

The menthol also won't help with Erectile Dysfunction, another common side-effect of smoking. But you can always get Viagra or Cialis.

Assuming your heart is healthy enough for those medications. Unfortunately, smoking is a major risk factor for heart disease.

So you may have to get your magic blue pills on the sly, through the web under false pretenses. Further assuming, of course, you can still breathe and walk well enough to actually want sex.

But trust me on the menthol.


Aug 19, 2015

My boyfriend's good friend is becoming an issue for me. What can I do?

I'm going to lob a ball from the guy's side of the court (observe sports metaphor.)

They're close friends. Guys really don't tend toward bisexuality all that often, it's often joked that "bi guys round off to gay, bi girls round off to straight." There is some truth to that.

He's got a close male friend. You don't particular like the dude. The amount of contact upsets you, but isn't excessive. It's not really a bad or unusual situation.

Be glad he has a sober friend and spends most of his time with you. Give him space to nurture his own friendships. If the friend irritates you, it's no biggee, you don't have to take part. If you two really just rub each other the wrong way, maintain a healthy distance.

Hold on loosely. Oh - and while he is off with his "bro" - isn't there a friend of yours or two that has gotten less attention from you since you stopped being single? Perhaps you could put some time and attention into those friendships.

This way, you're both there for each other, and you're also there for the larger world outside your relationship.


Aug 20, 2015

Who is going to the Top Writers NY Fall Meetup on Thursday, December 3, 2015?

Imma be there. My first TW meet up.

Can I get a +120? All guys.


Aug 21, 2015

Where do I find a vaporizer that uses material like tobacco?

Online. They are a little more expensive. Be careful that you get one that takes ... tobacco ... like ... *cough ... *ahem ... material. Here's one with a good reputation.

Pax Original Vaporizer - Black

Just make sure that you're buying a system that doesn't vaporize nicotine fluids nor oils, but rather "dry herbs". Google "dry herb vaporizer".
This will be suitable for your:

Tobacco.

Like.

Material.

(Or so I've read.)


Aug 22, 2015

What is the correct etiquette when the check arrives at a meal where you assume the other party will be paying? Do you remain motionless or fake reaching for the bill?

Always assume you are going to split the bill.

Pull out your wallet and begin tallying your share from the check. If the other party offers to pay, decline the first time with "Thank you so much, but I'm happy to pay." They will usually insist, at which point you thank them again and put your wallet away.

If they physically grab the check away from you the first time they offer, don't go through the charade of declining, just thank them and be done with it.


Aug 22, 2015

Do any climate scientists think there is any truth to Ivar Giaver’s perspective that Barack Obama and others have exaggerated the problems posed by climate change.

(Shame on Quorans for dodging the question to instead promote their view on Climate Change. Direct questions beg either a direct answer, or none at all.)

The most prominent scientist who opposes the prevailing polemic on anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is probably Richard Lindzen of MIT.


From Wikipedia :

Dr. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983[1] until he retired in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks", of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change.

He has been quite vocal in his criticism of the prevailing "polemic" [his term] on climate change.

Some of his lectures on the topic are available on youtube. Here's one :


Aug 22, 2015

Why do I always worry about blood clots?

This sounds like an anxiety/obsessive disorder. Fortunately, this is a very treatable condition, with various therapies and/or medications.

Get thee to a psychiatrist! No sense suffering needlessly.


Aug 24, 2015

Is it possible George W. Bush will be seen as a hero 50 years from now?

No, history compresses. There is so much time to cover that history reduces personal legacy to a TLDR version.

For example, Nixon is remembered for Watergate, opening relations with China, and withdrawing from Vietnam. History takes a mixed view of him.

The TLDR of W. Bush is that he bungled Katrina, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, and let Bin Laden slip away in Afghanistan.

So it's likely that history will mark him as grossly incompetent.


Aug 24, 2015

How was Nixon perceived before the Watergate scandal? Nixon won his election by a landslide, surely he was well thought of before the scandal.

I think the one word that best captures the perception of (pre-Watergate) Nixon is mercurial.

Slippery. Hard to pin down. Can turn on a dime. You can't tell where you stand with him. You're not sure what he wants.

This song about Nixon, called "Tricky Dicky", was recorded in 1962.


He was known as a mud-slinger, and prone to fight dirty in campaigns. This history goes all the way back to his work ferreting out "commies" for the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) under McCarthy.


How did he get elected? Fear. There was a general feeling at the time that America was devolving into chaos. Within the last 8 years, JFK and RFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated. President Johnson had refused to run for a second term. America had escalated and was now bogged down in a bloody stalemate in Vietnam. The civil rights movement turned violent as cities across America erupted in riots.


During Nixon's first term (1970), at Kent State University, the National Guard opened fire on students, killing four of them. College campuses across the country were besieged by protests and strikes. Continued civil unrest persisted through Nixon's re-election.


Nixon ran on a platform of "Law and Order." He said he represented the "quiet majority, the non-shouters." He promised that he had a 'secret plan' to end the Vietnam war without surrender ('peace with honor'. )

A fearful and confused electorate looked past his dubious character and voted him into office, twice.


Aug 25, 2015

Is there anything wrong with America? If so, what is it? What is the root cause? How is it adversely affecting us? What could feasibly eradicate it?

I don't think America needs to go back to the good ole days as the OP implies, rather we are not progressing fast enough.

Our foreign policy is interventionist in the extreme. We trample the world in pursuit of our economic interests, and wrap it all up in the tattered veil of "defending democracy."

We maintain a full-tilt defense (c'mon - can we finally say 'offense'?) stance. US military spending is 40% of the entire world's.

Our news media abandoned their post about 20 years ago. They print incendiary civil rights issues (a cop shot a black guy!) but do not criticize the instruments and corruptors of state power. (Looking at you, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, the media oligopoly.)

We can't get it through our heads what most of the industrialized world has realized : it's actually cheaper for society to pick up the bill for health care and education. Healthy, educated people contribute more than they take from society.

We burn too much gas, commuting great distances from the suburbs into cities.

We don't make anything. In 1950 we were the industrial power-house of the world. Now we import everything. If we piss off China, we're going to go back to the stone age.

We're so far in debt that we can't pay it off.

We have way too many people in jail for non-violent crimes, primarily due to the failed war on drugs. But we neglect addicts who seek help.

We're ignoring the elephant in the room - the greatest threat to our nation in the next 100 years. The world is running out of fossil fuels. Peak oil. Our society cannot function without abundant energy. The only known viable source of energy that can replace oil is nuclear. Safe designs for nuclear plants have existed for 20 years. We need 20,000 or so such plants to replace our dependence on fossil fuels. We aren't building them.


Still, however, a great, bold, ambitious nation of which I'm proud to be a part. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.


Aug 28, 2015

How is the United States different from the Roman Empire?

The Romans conquered, then built.

The US conquers, then abandons.


Aug 28, 2015

Is it okay to give my two-week notice in person, or do I need to write a letter?

This should be done in writing for record-keeping purposes. Your employer needs written proof that you are resigning at will (which impacts issues like unemployment benefits, wrongful termination suits, etc.)


Sep 3, 2015

If I have a 15 person development team, all skilled engineers (iOS, Mac, Android) that our company (a big public company) wants to cut, how do I reach the right people at Google, Facebook, etc. to sell the group (acquihire)?

Um, they're not yours to sell.


Sep 10, 2015

My girlfriend has a profile on the dating site we met at and she's active there. I have done snooping and have found shocking stuff. What should I do?

Lies, infedility, duplicity.

Bail. It'll only get worse.

(And don't let this experience spill over into your next relationship. Trust and do not snoop. And again, leave this woman before your capacity to trust is permanently desytroyed.)


Sep 12, 2015

What are some great examples of coincidence?

This is Wilmer McLean, roughly 1860.






He was a grocer in Virginia. He lived a quiet life in this house ...




... in a little town called Manassas. The first pitched battle of the Civil War - the Battle of Manassas - took place here. A cannonball crashed through the roof and destroyed the kitchen.

Understandably, Wilmer decided to move his family to someplace safe from the war. He relocated here :





To a little town called Appomatox.

The war followed Mr. McLean, where the 'Battle of Appomatox' was the Confederate's final defeat. Formal surrender terms were signed in McLean's living room.

The Civil War had begun in his yard and ended in his living room.


Sep 12, 2015

Why do I get upset with my husband when I'm drunk?

First alcohol excites, then it depresses.

Nobody cries into their second beer. They cry into their fifth.


Sep 13, 2015

How many songs can you store on a 8gb memory stick?

4 MB per song is a good rule of thumb, so 2,000 fits in 8 GB.


Sep 14, 2015

Recommendations for feel good hip Hop?

Really only one possible answer here.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta - The Geto Boys.

(Warning : Not Safe For Work)


Sep 14, 2015

If an intelligent alien came to Earth, would it have the same rights as humans?

No, but more importantly for a creature capable of interstellar travel :

What rights would They grant us?


Sep 15, 2015

What should I do if my boyfriend tried to kill me and denies that he tried to kill me?

Sounds unintentional. Just change positions so you're clear of the vice grip.


Sep 15, 2015

Mental Health: How can you tell if someone is a narcissist?

Two very simple ways.

To echo Neto Sosa's answer, wait until you get a minor injury. The narcissist will quickly ask if you're seriously hurt but upon hearing "No" will lose interest completely. They will not ask if you're in pain, if you need anything, if you need help. They will just drift off.

Notice how many times they use the word 'Narcissist'. They see narcissists all around them and point them out. In fact, virtually the only people to use the word 'narcissist' are themselves narcissists. Strange. Or perhaps not. The Narcissus of Greek mythology was, after all, staring at his own reflection.


Sep 16, 2015

Back in the 60s did they let kids smoke cigarettes?

60's ?

I was in high school from 1980-1984 at Norwich Free Academy. There were smoking areas, where students (14-18) were allowed to smoke between class. Technically they were supposed to have a 'note from their parents', but nobody ever asked for nor furnished such a note.

It was just accepted that kids would smoke, and it was safer that they didn't sneak it in the bathroom. There also was this ethic that young people should not acquire that other deadly habit - lying.


Sep 16, 2015

What are some of the coolest ways to react if someone mistakes you for a server in a restaurant and asks you to clean the table?

Do it.

When you finish, lean over and whisper into the diner's ear, "The salad dressing is people ..."


Sep 16, 2015

Mathematics: Is 30 divisible by 2 and 3?

Yes.

And using Quora to answer this is like killing a mosquito with a thermonuclear intergalitic Ballistic Missile.


Sep 16, 2015

How has programming influenced the way you think? In what ways has it enabled you to think differently?

Think twice. Programming taught me that a complex solution will often assert itself first in your mind. Discard your brain's first idea and go back to look for the simpler and more elegant answer. Think twice.

For example, consider this problem from set theory. Given a set of N elements, how many subsets can we form?

We'll, there is one null-set, N subsets of size 1 ... Stop. Think twice.

Each of the N elements is either in or out of the subset. That makes 2^n possibilities.

Here's another one. A bucket of water sits next to a bucket of wine. Both buckets have the same volume. We take a cup, fill it with water from bucket one and dump it into bucket 2. We then take an equal volume from bucket 2 and dump it into bucket one. Did more wine than water get transferred?

We'll, let the volume of the cup be C and of the initial buckets be B. The ratio of wine/water in bucket number two becomes ...

Stop. Think twice. Both buckets start and end at equal volumes. So liquid was equally exchanged.

By pausing to think twice, you save a lot of time.


Sep 17, 2015

I just started programming. Why does it make me feel so idiotic?

That's just your reach exceeding your grasp. That's as it should be. It means you are reaching well.

You're only in trouble when you find that you can grasp everything you reach. Then you've fallen under the delusion there is nothing left to learn.


Sep 17, 2015

If the United States were a bar, what would each state be drinking and doing?

Massachusetts would be slugging a quart of boot-legged whiskey in the back seat of a police car.


Sep 17, 2015

What's the evolutionary theory behind songs?

It is likely that songs evolved in human culture as a nmemonic device (memory aid), before the invention of writing. It's easier to memorize a song than just a string of words, so songs were probably used to transmit history, recipes, procedures, etc.

We still do this. How did you learn the alphabet?


Sep 17, 2015

If being homosexual is not a choice, what is it?

Inborn.


Sep 18, 2015

I'm in love. Can I get some advice?

I'm not going to tell you what to do, as other posters have. I'm not going to condescend to you or presume to make choices for you.

There is this disease that affects us as we age. We think we are ninjas, masters, experts at Being Young.

Because we did it once. We think we can see your life in all its future implications, and guide it in just the perfect way.

The fact is, I was 14 for 365 days. It wasn't enough time to learn much, and I forgot most of it. I also did dumb things - like start smoking.

To presume I am an oracle who can direct your life is a lot like saying I am an expert at how to get around Paris, simply because I got lost there 30 years ago.

So. To your question. You're 14 and she's 17. What should you do? F*****d if I know. There is of course a legal complication, when you're 15 and she's 18. I'd watch out for that.

Oh - one thing. I said I wouldn't tell you what to do. I lied.

Brace yourself. This relationship will probably self-destruct - soon. At 18 she won't want to date a 15 year old. At 20 she sure as hell won't want to date a high school student. And most relationships blow up anyway. The end, if and when it comes, may be swift and without warning.

So take that into account as you make your own decisions about your unique life. And accept advice from no-one too eager to give it.


Sep 22, 2015

What if I told you (and could prove) that the quantum theory directly correlates with the existence of Jesus Christ?

I would conclude that you understand neither.


Sep 22, 2015

I told a girl I like her, but she said, "I would rather date a toilet than you". What should I do? What should my comeback have been?

"Well, I do have one thing in common with the toilet.

We both deserve better."


Sep 24, 2015

Social Media: What does it mean when a guy deletes all of his ex's photos and comments, and even unfollowed her?

He may have blocked her, suppressing photo-tags/comments.


Sep 25, 2015

Are the wealthy of earth paid to hide Satan?

I'm pretty sure that if Satan exists, he can hide himself (probably as an anchor on Fox)


Sep 26, 2015

What is the last thing you want to hear from your partner when you have just woken up with a splitting headache?

The sound of reloading.


Sep 26, 2015

Should I cancel my interview with Google? I have a phone interview with Google, and I haven't had time to prepare since I've been interviewing with other companies. I feel I might not be ready for Google's more challenging interviews.

I don't recall that the phone screen required any preparation. It was more of an open-ended conversation; no real technical drilling.

However, I had a couple of decades of experience and this was Boston, not Mountain View.


Sep 26, 2015

Will there ever be an operating system dedicated to Quora?

No, Quora has too many dependencies:

Wikipedia, IMDB, Youtube, Google Image Search ...


Sep 26, 2015

How can one become a better storyteller?

Disappear.

When Rothko painted, he would softly *dab* the paint onto the canvas. He didn't want to leave any evidence of the act of creation, or the presence of a creator.

Disappear behind the story. Lose self-consciousness. Lose any desire to impress, don't talk about yourself, don't allude to your strengths or weaknesses. It's not about you.

Disappear.


Sep 27, 2015

What are some interesting facts about WWII?

There was a battle over Los Angeles.

Battle of Los Angeles

In February of 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, West Coast cities were braced for Japanese bombing. Anti-aircraft batteries were hastily deployed.

The night of Feb 26; something appeared in the sky over LA. Enemy planes? A UFO? Reflection of search-lights? Nobody knows.

The anti-aircraft guns let loose in a terrific barrage as arc lamps swept across the clouds.

Now the sky resembled a pinball machine and gunners couldn't distinguish the 'enemy' from their own fire. They kept shooting. For two days. Five people were killed as shells fell to earth.

To this day nobody knows what, if anything, they were shooting at.


Sep 27, 2015

If women are equal to men, why have men achieved so much more throughout history?

I think you mean you're not being 'sexist'.

Anyway, I don't know why there are more male scientists. But I can tell you this :

My grandmother, Mary Curtis, was among a small group of women first admitted into an engineering program at MIT in the 1940's.

When she graduated, the Boston Globe ran a story on her and the other inaugural, women graduates. It stated that they have broken new ground and now join the vibrant community of innovators in Boston and Cambridge.

So that they may assist their husbands.

You read that right. Just two generations back, a woman endures the demanding curriculum of a world-class engineering school and is welcomed into the profession as an assistant.

If men said that openly, publically, in print - imagine what they said and did behind close doors.

Imagine what they still say and do.


Sep 27, 2015

How should I ask my mum that I want to wear my glasses all the time?

Hi and welcome to Quora.

I think you posed the question just fine here.

I suggest you show them your question just as you've written it.


Sep 28, 2015

Were electrostatic shocks (other than lightning) much noticed or remarked on historically, before a proper scientific understanding of electricity developed?

Sure, in Ancient Greece, Zeus was thought to hurl lightening bolts. In the early Rennaisance, lightening was commonly thought to be some sort of exploding gas.

Static electricity was noticed (by people and also cats) but the two phenomena weren't connected until finally it was posited that lightening is electricity.


Sep 28, 2015

Question That Contains Assumptions: Why do people bother researching dinosaurs and other prehistoric stuff if it can't help us with anything nowadays?

Consider this :

250 Million years ago, a huge area in Siberia flooded with hot lava. Unlike a localized volcanic eruption, this was a 'flood basalt eruption' where hundreds of square miles erupt at once.

This released unprecedented amounts of CO2. The average surface temperature of Earth increased by 5 degrees C.

The oceans warmed. There was all this methane gas 'frozen' in solid form at the ocean floor. It turned back to gas and the oceans fizzed.

Methane' s a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The Earth got another 5 degrees (C) hotter.

For life, that was too hot, too fast. Thus began the near-collapse of life on Earth, often called the Great Dying : The Permian Mass Extinction.

90 % of all life above ground vanished. 70 % of sea life went with it, along with most plant life.

From a 5 degree warming due to CO2. Seems relevant to our modern world.


Sep 28, 2015

Discuss how communication has changed in the last five years, "focus on the new developements in computer technology".

Digital technology has connected people who once were unable to communicate.

For example, a student may cut-and-paste his homework problem and appeal to the entire world to do it for him.

Discuss.


Sep 29, 2015

Quora has chastised me for referring to a poster as a moron. The fact is that I had written the truth. Is it really fair for Quora to edit the truth and provide a punishment protocol for truth-tellers?

Truth is a necessary but not sufficient condition of Respectful.

"You're fat. You're gay. You're Jewish."

Any of these may be true, but they are disrespectful/harassing. You may object, "but those aren't related to the post at all!"

OK, "you're stupid", "you're ignorant", "you're a fool." These things may be true but they are also disrespectful and also irrelevant to the contents of the post. It's an ad hominem attack.

If they are a moron and wrote a badly reasoned post, correct their reasoning. No need for name-calling.

By the way, an old adage warns : "If you find yourself arguing with an idiot, the idiot is doing the same thing."


Sep 30, 2015

Did six million people really die in the Holocaust? Were six million bodies really found?

As Gwydion Madawc Williams points out, the numbers are murky. Especially at Auschwitz, the largest complex with the highest death count.

This uncertainty arises from a number of factors : The Nazis were trying to conceal the Holocaust from their own people and the international community. The cover story was a Typhus epidemic was racing through the camps. (Which it actually was.). The Nazis destroyed structures and other evidence as they retreated to Berlin. The Soviets further obfuscated matters by rebuilding some of the structures and exaggerating their findings to make better propaganda.

So we'll never get a good death toll. Modern historians put the figure at around 4 million.

The fog of time and war aside, it is a certainty that millions of Jews and others were deliberately killed by the Nazis. We have multiple confessions from the Nuremburg trials, eyewitness testimony from inmates, and Hitler's own last testament where he refers to the Jews as the real enemy, and the eradication effort "more humane" than the allied bombing of civilians.


Oct 1, 2015

How can I become a Top Writer on Quora?

Be succinct. Quora is ruled by that clipped American mode of speaking. A la Hemingway. Grammar, step aside.

Pick a question that interests you. Don't answer just because you can, but because you think other people will be interested.

"Nobody cares, brah!"


Use pictures though. They add narrative color.


Have a unique perspective. If you can come at things from an unexpected angle, your answer will be fresh and unique.

What? It's a lamp.


Be humble. I was hoping to give good Quora writing advice, but this post mostly sucks. Don't write like this.

And lastly but most importantly by far : When you are finished, shut up.


Oct 2, 2015

ًWhat are the essential differences between WWI and WWII in strategies, tactics and weaponry?

World War II was fast moving. Planes, tanks and mechanized infantry (troop carriers : trucks) enabled an army to quickly pierce enemy defenses and roll in before the defender could adapt. After all, Blitzkrieg means "Lightening War." The advantage was with the attacker - those in motion.

WW I, by contrast, was stagnant. Trenches and machine guns gave the defender the advantage. An attacker (on foot) would be gunned down. Millions died while lines didn't move.

WW II also was a war of annihilation, where both sides gave in to 'total war.' Civilian populations were deliberately targeted and entire cities were fire-bombed.


Oct 2, 2015

Why am I not allowed to interact with someone's service dog?

A time-honored retort from a comedian to hecklers comes to mind :

"Hey! I'm working here! I don't show up at your job and screw around with the French fry machine!"


Oct 5, 2015

What is the most common breaking-point that leads you to believe you are interacting with an intelligent person?

Unexpected perspective shift.

The person sees things from an unexpected vantage point. Some examples from encounters with real folks:

It often, but not always, takes the form of humor. I was a kid at Thanksgiving, and spilled my peas all over the table. My Aunt quipped, "too bad they don't make square peas!"

A group of us ordered pizzas. Someone asked me, "who ordered what kind?" I replied "everyone ordered cheese."

"Oh Jesus! Now we'll never sort out whose is whose!"

Sometimes it's not a joke, though. Just a simple, useful observation. A group of us went over to this guy's apartment. We couldn't park because the lot was full. So the driver just looked for the guy's car and couldn't find it. The driver started to leave.

A passenger interrupted, "he could still be here. He's just got nowhere near to park!"


Oct 5, 2015

Alcoholism: When can suddenly stopping drinking be a bad idea?

A simple rule of thumb is to check your pulse (and blood pressure, if possible).

If they rise above normal, get medical help immediately and (yes, I'll get flak for this) pour yourself one drink.

Disclaimer : I am not a medical professional and should never be one.


Oct 5, 2015

Why did the German people look so happy under Nazi rule? Were they really happy?

Notice how nobody ever looks at the camera in the footage.

It was a dangerous thing to do that. And it was a very dangerous thing to be the least enthusiastic person in the frame.

It is similar to the politburo under Stalin. Members would applaud Stalin, and nobody wanted to be the first to stop. So the applause just kept going.

Eventually a bell was needed to call for silence.

This is perhaps best explained by one caught up in it,

"The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it. It was reason enough that people who distanced themselves too obviously - sshh! - were daily and nightly tortured to death with steel whips and electric drills. Better to celebrate, howl with the wolves, "Heil! Heil!” — Sebastian Heffner, German Writer and Reporter

Oct 5, 2015

Why am I suddenly seeing pop-up ads on Quora? (August 21, 2014)

I've never seen an ad, but I'm fairly disgusted by rhetorical questions.

Those ad popups you're seeing? That's malware in your browser.


Oct 7, 2015

What are the most annoying types of questions on Quora?

Rhetorical : "Don't people realize that the Illuminati have assumed the form of crab people and infiltrated Dunkin' Donuts?"

Atheist baiting : "How do atheists explain the fact that giraffes smell funny?"

Homework problems (extra points for not even stating as a question) : "Compare and contrast Jesus to Spider-Man?"

Luft-Mensch (German for 'air-man', a person who is all dreams and no action). "I want to be a billionaire in social networking. All I need are investors, developers, marketers and early adopters. Can someone help take care of these details - within the next eight weeks?"


Oct 9, 2015

I heard that Quora eventually plans to add advertising to fund itself. Will I earn royalties if my answers attract a lot of views?

As with Facebook, No.


Oct 10, 2015

What makes 2001: A Space Odyssey so surreal? How come it speaks with so many people on many different levels?

Ah, the "Grand Daddy of all science fiction movies." What makes it special?

To get in Kubrick's head, I think we have to go back to 1967, when the film was made. Don't worry, I'm not going to reduce 2001 to historical context. I just want to briefly snap back to 1967 because I think it's worth ... the trip.

In the late 60's, the first generation born in the specter of The Bomb was coming of age. The US and the Soviets were deadlocked in a nuclear standoff. "We eyed
each other across a trembling world", said Kennedy. For the first time in human development, we had to confront the possibility of our own extinction. Had humanity taken a wrong turn? Should it be here?

These mortal questions were no longer academic. They asserted themselves in every air-raid drill, every radar blip. Who are we and what is to become of us?

The second gust of change was exactly antithetical to the prospect of doom. The space age had dawned. We had figured it out. How to orbit the earth, to drift in space. We were going to the moon and it looked like we would make it.


Oct 10, 2015

What are the best examples of software bugs that became features (aka misbugs)?

MySpace never intended to let users "bling out" their pages with various colors, fonts, the dreaded blinking tag and even plug-ins.

A bug lets users add any HTML tag. People loved it and went nuts. This freedom helped spur the early success of MySpace.

It soon got out of control, and the experience became a sensory cacophony of colors, layouts, sounds and popups.

Facebook came along: muted, simple, and consistent. Everyone abandoned ship.


Oct 10, 2015

Can a startup with new idea compete with market giant companies like Google and Facebook? What are recommended steps I can take regardless of having an idea patent?

Startups like Facebook and Google did.


Oct 12, 2015

If I want my six-week-old daughter to be president of United States when she grows up, what can I do to help her prepare while she’s growing up?

Don't. The good life is an escape from two cages.

The first is the dreams of others.

The second is the dreams of our youth.


Oct 14, 2015

What can one read or learn in order to become more smart?

Minimize the disruptive effect of school on your education.


Oct 16, 2015

Linux: Is there a Terminal command that would let me enter the root password once per session so I can install software, updates, etc without having to do it per request ?

sudo -i


Oct 16, 2015

If we have a black president and are on our way to having a woman president, what's the next presidential frontier?

Electing a president without notice or reference to race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.


Oct 16, 2015

Where does one find high integrity journalism wrt American politics?

In the past, unfortunately.

The modern news media has abandoned its post, and serves as an instrument of state and corporate power. It functions to distract society with the hot-button issues of race, sex and violence. The real issues : erosion of liberty, accretion of state and corporate power, violated sovereignty of foreign governments are avoided without exception.

"And that's the way it is." -- Walter Cronkite


Oct 17, 2015

Is employee stack ranking beneficial?

It is a direct disincentive to cooperate, help others, mentor or deflect credit. All the things that make a team.

Ironically, once a year the (non-) group will go paddle a canoe as a "team building exercise."


Oct 19, 2015

I have a staff member who produces brilliant work but is consistently late every single day. I can't fire him because it will take months to find someone to fill his position. What can I do?

The details to your question are very conflicted, and I think you should take some time to reflect on this matter.

You say - back and forth - that it does matter and does not matter that he's late. On the one hand, you sit there wondering when he's going to show up. On the other, he's never more than 15 minutes late. That an issue might come up at 9 sharp - but that is very rare. If he does this for 10 years, you wouldn't fire him due to the quality of his work. That it's a small issue, but it's bothering you because it's a small issue.

The central question is this : Is this about your company or is it about you ?
Does his coming in late really impede your company's performance? Or are you personally bothered by a lack of control ? (Why are you recording how many minutes he is late every day?)

Because as his manager, one of the most important things you do is this : see where the rules have to bend for the benefit of the company. Unfair? Sure. It's also not fair he gets paid better than someone not so talented or experienced. You're not there to be fair. You're there to guard your employer's interests.

Try this thought experiment : Take this guy's next raise or bonus, and withhold it. Instead, pay somebody else to go to his house at 8:30 and pick his lazy ass up. Solved.

How do you feel about this? Is it overboard? Too much? Silly? Are you saying "I shouldn't have to do that!" or even "How would that make me look?"

Then you already know - it's not worth fixing. Make peace with it. Late for him is 9:20. Done.


Oct 19, 2015

Is 90% of an existing ideal relationship better than scraping it in hopes of finding a 100% ideal relationship?

Oxygen is only 10% of the atmosphere.

But it's a required 10% .


Oct 21, 2015

What is the best three line short story with irony in the last line?

He sat, idly reading on his phone.

Realizing a vast, wonderously better tale existed in real life, he lifted his eyes to the world.

You missed your cue.


Oct 22, 2015

What's the best sarcastic answer to the question, "Are you a virgin"?

Ask your Mom. She knows


Oct 22, 2015

Except for humans and dinosaurs, has there ever been another dominant species on earth?

On close inspection, the question kind of falls apart.

Dinosaurs weren't a species, but rather a huge group of animals belonging to a 'Clade'. Taxanomy aside, things also get confusing when we try to define 'dominant'.

Most populous? Single-celled creatures like amoeba win out.

Top predator? The Spinosaurus was probably more fearsome than a T-Rex :


Most successful at wiping out other species? This distinction goes to Cyanobacteria, the first organisms to create oxygen via photosynthesis.


These appeared on Earth about 2.3 Billion years ago. Their appearance heralded the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. This was Earth's longest and coldest ice age, wrapping the whole planet in glaciers. Many life-forms perished forever. The Cyanobacteria are still with us.

So - it seems we humans don't take the prize in terms of population, duration, lethality, or ability to disrupt our environment.

Perhaps we should keep it that way.


Oct 29, 2015

What does these line of code mean/do in C?

It's not very elegant, but it appears to read the string parameters of a URL stored in an array.

More precisely, given the string Line[RT] (in an array of strings living in memory), it reads from the '?' character until the end. These two end-points are marked in qInd and qEnd.

It then allocates a string (array of characters) in the variable q. Finally it copies everything after the '?' in Line[RT] into the new string q.

If no '?' is found, q is populated with a single null terminator. Again, this is some pretty gross code. A good exercise would be to rewrite it so it's clean, succinct and more clearly correct.


Oct 29, 2015

Why do people participate in lotteries?

The typical objection to lotteries is : "The expected payoff is less than the cost of the ticket!"

That is, expected payoff e = p x m, where p is the probability of winning and m is the money you win.

The thing is : this is only the expected pay-off, averaged over all plays, for an infinite number of plays (or at least all the lottery tickets sold.)

For a small number of trials, this definition is meaningless. We really don't have any useful understanding of probability for a small never of trials.

Also, lottery pay-offs can accumulate so that the expected payoff exceeds the price of a ticket. Indeed, there have been attempts to buy all the tickets printed.


Oct 29, 2015

What is the psychology behind people making a mess and not cleaning it up?

Well, there is a cognitive bias many folks have that if others don't do what you expect, (e.g., cleaning up how and when you desire), they have some complex reason not too. Like : they're being passive aggressive, they are rebelling against over controlling parents, they suffer from ADHD or desperately need to attend Dr. Milkstain's Mindfulness In The New Millenium (tm) seminar.

My mind is on my expectations - not yours -it does not satisfy any need to fault others.


Oct 30, 2015

What is your best (and most creative) theory to what [SPOILER] may NOT be dead?

Another possibility :

Glenn fell and got knocked out. Nicholas fell on top of him. Glenn dreams he is eaten by Walkers, when in fact he is safely concealed under Nicholas' body.


Nov 1, 2015

Is it illegal to create a business name that adds "2.0" at the end of an existing registered business name? Ex. "Basket Weaving 2.0"

Yes, if you use a name for profit would tend to be confused with an existing trademark, the courts will rapidly shut you down.

So Facebook 2.0 is a non starter.


Nov 2, 2015

I want to utilize my tech skills to help non profits - but I want to do it from home (I'm in a remote place). How do I get started?

I take it you mean you want to work for free. Kudos to you! I've done a bit of this, and what I've found is this ;

Brace yourself for rejection. Most non profits, if you offer your services, won't respond. This is suprising, especially at first. We can only speculate as to the reasons : People working at a non profit are much like workers in a for-profit. They get paid, they want to pad their resumes, they want a promotion, they don't want to make a mistake. Taking you on is outside their comfort zone and probably doesn't advance their personal agenda. So ...
Go to the top. Talk directly to the CEO or Chairman of the Board. If they won't make room for a 20 minute call, keep looking.
Know what you want to build. Target a specific group you want to help, and think up a way to help them. Build a prototype. For example, blind folk may need rides in your town. Maybe Uber drivers, in their way back from a regular fair, can give such a person a ride in exchange for an optional 5 dollar tip from the previous customer. Or, less ambitiously, maybe day care workers could use a mobile app to track attendance and not lose kids. The point is give them something to say yes to.
Be choosy. You aren't asking for anything, you are offering. The response you seek is, "Awesome! Can you come down and show my staff? What would you need from us?" You're not going to get this right away, or even soon. But keep trying and hold out until you do
Don't be discouraged. You are trying to do some good in the world. The non-profit organizations themselves are just the gate-keepers. The people who benefit are what really counts, silent though their thanks may be.

Nov 2, 2015

I have an interview for internship at Mathsworks, What math related stuffs I should brush up?

Their name. It's Mathworks.


Nov 7, 2015

Can you carry a vaping device on an air plane?

Yup, I've flown about 30 times with a biggish vape on me. TSA knows what they are.

Just make sure you place it in a separate bin going through security. If it's in your carry-on it can trigger a back check.

Do not hit that thing on the plane ! The vapor could easily be mistaken for a fire or worse - a fuse.


Nov 11, 2015

I have this very good idea that would revolutionise the banking sector. How can I sell this idea without the risk of being turned down and my idea stolen?

Ah, the perennial Quora question asked a thousand different ways.

You can't sell an idea.

You can't protect an idea.

Nobody will fund an idea.

If you implement your idea, odds are nobody will use it and you'll fail. So do this quickly (fail quickly) so you can move on.

If you do succeed, competitors will appear almost immediately. The race is on. Stay ahead of them.


Nov 12, 2015

Is there any scientific reason/study behind banning electronic cigarettes in, for example, airplanes?

There really aren't yet any definitive studies as to the long-term health effects of e-cigs, either first- or second- hand.

The usual explanation for restricting their use is precisely this : that we don't know enough about them yet.

As for an airplane - this is a special case with a very good reason. The vapor may be mistaken for smoke - an indicator that a fire (or worse) has occurred.


Nov 13, 2015

How do I react when my girlfriend cheats on me and after a few weeks needs my blood to survive?

"Sorry for the lateness of my reply, I just wanted to make sure my new girlfriend is comfortable with it.

Luckily she has consented."


Nov 13, 2015

How do I make a low resolution logo and turn it into high resolution version without having to redesign it or compromise its shape—using Photoshop?

Use Scalable Vector graphics (SVG), which is now supported by PhotoShop (Generate SVG with Photoshop CC).

SVG works by defining an image not as a table of pixels, but rather as a series of lines or curves to be drawn. When you scale up, the picture is redrawn instead of just magnified.

For example, Quora won't let me upload it, but here is an SVG image you can play with :

Page on clker.com

Its original dimensions are 500x500. Here's what it looks like rescaled super-small :

Zooming in ...

Keep going ...

Now going well past the original 500x500 resolution ...

Still smooth curves, let's push it ...

Whoa. So now the total image is way over 10,000 pixels high. Still perfectly smooth.

Stroke vector graphics to the rescue.


Nov 14, 2015

I'm 13 and making an operating system. Am I crazy? Should I do easier projects until I am better at programming?

Absolutely. But you ask that like it's a bad thing.

It's not.


Nov 16, 2015

What was Hitler's Phony War about inWWII? Why would he do such an odd thing?

In 1939, Hitler didn't want war with Great Britain and France. At least not yet.

His aspirations were to the East : Poland and the Soviet Union. He considered Slavic people subhuman Untermenschen and thought it was both appropriate and easy to conquer them.

After Hitler invaded Poland, he repeatedly offered peace to England and France. He expected them to accept; this was his fateful miscalculation.

The 'phony war' was the lull between the Allied (French and British) declaration of war, and the first open battles. So your question is more properly directed at the Allies. The simple answer is they were caught by surprise by Germany's invasion and needed time to prepare for war.


Nov 16, 2015

Attacks in Central Paris (November 2015): Why is the western world "over sympathizing" France in regards to the November 2015 attacks in Central Paris?

Well, Boston is my home city. We were all badly shaken up by the Boston Marathon bombings - a considerably smaller attack than that in Paris.

And I can say this : Seeing the outpouring of sympathy and support from people all over the world did help people feel better.


Nov 16, 2015

What is something people never use correctly?

"Therefore". Almost everyone says "so therefore", which is redundant. Therefore 'so' doesn't belong.

"Steep learning curve." People use this to mean something is hard to learn, as in climbing a steep hill. Actually, a learning curve is a plot of progress over time - if it's steep, you are making rapid progress. It's easy to learn. This misunderstanding may stem from the false analogy of a steep hill, which is harder to climb. Difficult to learn tasks have a shallow learning curve.

Deconstruct”. This does not mean to destroy. It means to disassemble in order to understand its parts. A radio is deconstructed by mapping out its circuit board. It is not deconstructed by bashing it against a rock.

Tooth-paste. Advertising photography has us believing we need to put as much tooth-paste on the brush as will fit:

The truth is, you spit almost all of this out right away. A pea-sized amount cleans just as well:

Calamine lotion:

That age-old remedy for chicken-pox, poison ivy... anything itchy. But look carefully and you'll see the bottle doesn't claim it relieves anything. It's just a "skin protectant." That's because it doesn't do anything. At all. As in nothing.


Nov 16, 2015

Psychology of Everyday Life: What are some of the greatest examples of absence of mind?

This plane was brand spanking new in 1972.

The pilot had 30 years of experience. Just before a midnight approach to Miami, he deployed the landing gear.

A small light in the cockpit was supposed to indicate when the landing gear was down and secure. That light had burned out.

No matter - the landing gear could be deployed by a hand crank and verified by sight. But the pilot was annoyed by the failure of the light.

Instead, he delayed the landing and ascended to a holding pattern at 2,000 feet. He wanted to debug the problem.

He sent the copilot down to eye-ball the landing gear. He then raised the gear up and back down.

While he was screwing around with the (fully functioning) landing gear, turning around to talk to the co-pilot - he didn't notice he had deactivated the autopilot and nudged the nose of the plane slightly downward.

The altitude alarm went unheard because it was on the copilot's side - now vacant.

"We're still at 2,000 feet, right?" was the final transmission of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 before crashing into the ground, killing 101 people.

The plane was found to be in perfect working order except for a single burnt out light bulb.


Nov 17, 2015

I realized I'm a narcissist. I like being admired and I am extremely insecure of other people. I see my friends “ahead” of me and I don’t like it. My last two boyfriends couldn’t stand me. Yet, I have a bloated sense of self. What should I do?

I think it's essentially impossible for a narcissist to bemoan their own narcissism.

A narcissist would either see everyone else as a narcissist, or embrace and celebrate their own narcissism (damn RIGHT I'm a narcissist!!!)

From your details you seem like a work-in-progress at age 30. Somewhat insecure, competitive, perhaps blaming yourself a little too much. You keep up appearances, you fantasize about success, you are sometimes envious of others. You feel special.

In other words, you're thirty.

DSM categories referencing Ancient Greek mythology may illuminate your path, but I doubt it.


Nov 18, 2015

How were Roman troops, such as Julius Caesar's, financed?

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's ..."
-- The Holy Bible, Mathew 22.21 (E.S.V.)


Taxes! The Ancient Roman Empire was very much a money-making enterprise. They were actually pretty lax in comparison to modern times. The tax-rate typically ran 1-3% of all assetts including harvest, land, slaves, animals, etc.

Taxes would be levied against individuals, and sometimes against entire communities (to remove the need for census taking.) Collection was privatized; tax-debt was auctioned off to professional collectors called Publicani. These were essentially hired thugs who would show up at your door and shake you down .

Rome also grew rich off the spoils of war. As it expanded it took possession of gold, silver, salt and all sorts of natural resources.


Nov 19, 2015

What's it like to write what you know to be a brilliant and profound answer and have it go virtually unnoticed, while a Quora celebrity saying something slightly clever gets a quarter million views and over 10,000 upvotes?

I guess you'd consider me a minor Quora 'celebrity', in that I've got something like 10,000 followers, 10 million views, and so forth.

And I can say this : my favorite answers are all unpopular. Some flippant and short answers have 20,000 + upvotes.

And more : other heavily upvoted writers say the same thing.

This caught me off guard. I was surprised I was unable to predict what would take off and what wouldn't. And perhaps a little hurt that my best stuff languished in obscurity.

Then I got over it. Popularity is a strange phenomena. It involves coincidence, network effects, and who knows what.

It's great when it comes. But it's fickle.

Once you accept that, you're cool with it. You just keep doing what you do, and occasionally the result catches fire in your rear view mirror.

And your favorite posts sit quietly awaiting discovery. It's all good.


Nov 21, 2015

What are some interesting facts about birds?

Birds are the reason that hot peppers are hot.

Peppers have this stuff called capsaicin which creates a burning sensation when eaten. This prevents animals from eating them.

This was a puzzle, since peppers clearly evolved to be eaten so their seeds pass through the digestive tract.

Finally it was discovered birds don't react to capsaicin. They don't feel the heat. So they alone eat the peppers.

Peppers evolved this trait so that their seeds would hitch a ride with birds and spread to great distances.


Nov 22, 2015

Which art subjects interested Hitler?

Scenery and buildings. Hitler had a strange block when it came to rendering ... Living things.


Nov 22, 2015

Can we use specific coordinates to define a location in space when no mass is there?

The short answer is yes.

We don't require mass-energy at every point, only that it exists somewhere in the Cosmos. Einstein held that matter is "spacially extended." If there is no matter at all, this view denies the existence of space (time-space.)

Less abstractly, if there is no mass-energy at all, what experiment would detect time-space? None is possible, so the question of space's existence isn't meaningful.

However, so long as there is a single particle of anything, it can be shrouded in an arbitrarily big field of time-space. Because now the particle can appear wherever, whenever.

And the 'particle' has no fixed location anyway. It's a wave packet; the amplitudes peak at what we call the 'center', but really the packet spreads out without bound to fill all of space. More directly : with low probability the particle may blink out of existence and reappear anywhere at all.


Nov 24, 2015

What drives people to write on Quora?

Readers.

Quora provides an instant audience. Its 'microblogging' model of curating questions and topics connects readers to writers.

Each question is a jumping-off point from which to write; it comes preloaded with interested folks before the first word is written.


Nov 24, 2015

Do people find the term "women and children" disturbing and unjust, as though men can't be at least as innocent as women, and just as deserving of consideration?

As a man, the term - in the rare circumstances it applies - evokes an ancient sense of duty and pride, even honor.

Even today, if a ship is going down, it's save 'women and children first." This is as it should be.


Nov 24, 2015

Is the term "human resources" demeaning to employees?

Yes, and more importantly it demeans the organization that's using it.

It's the kind of limping, false erudition that makes English teachers cringe.
An awkward phrase for 'people'.

It's silly. "Human", in order to clarify we're not talking trained monkeys or hyenas.

It's darkly cynical. A 'resource' has no soul and no personality. It can be stored, swapped out, traded with another 'resource' without effect. It is anything but human.


"Human Resources is people!"


Nov 25, 2015

I watched a space walk today; if the spacecraft needs to orbit at 17,000 mph, how come there seems to be no effect on the astronauts?

Hang on to your hat.

Screw your hat; hang on to yourself. Strap yourself to a pole. Then strap the pole to ... something. Another pole.

I have some unsettling news. At this moment you are moving at a half million miles per hour. Around the center of the Milky Way.


We circle the Milky Way every 200 million years. We've already been around it dozens of times. That works out to a half million miles per hour.

You can't feel it because the orbit is so large compared to our solar system that it's very close to perfectly smooth linear motion. As if you're sleeping on a silent train, you can't tell you're moving.

But the rotational forces are there, barely detectable. So it is with the rotation of the earth.

Your body is so much smaller than the earth that it feels like linear motion. There are, however, a number of clever experiments you can do to detect the rotational forces at play, i.e., the Coriolis effect.


Nov 25, 2015

Why would a guy stare at a girl's face so intently?

I'm going to take a little ... lattitude here.

Men evolved into the role of hunter in the human family. Theirs is the predator's gaze :

Their eyes see a target of desire and they lock on :

Multiple studies conclude that heterosexual men experience greater arousal from visual stimulation than women do. The difference even shows up on imaging tests of the brain. See, for example, Functional neuroimaging studies of sexual arousal and orgasm in healthy men and women: a review and meta-analysis..

It would seem, that for homo sapien males, beauty is very much in the eye of the ... hunter.


Nov 25, 2015

How will you sum up the two world wars in as brief as possible so that a layman can also understand it easily?

Central Europe attacks Eastern Europe and is defeated by Western Europe.

Twice.


Nov 26, 2015

I was out with my girlfriend at around 12 am when a group of people on bikes chased us, harassed her, and made sick comments. I was very angry, but simply requested that they leave us alone. Did I do the wrong thing? Why do some men behave like this?

I was once on vacation in Miami with my girlfriend.

We were walking around randomly exploring. We came upon a group of a hundred or so teenagers hanging out.

There was nothing overtly threatening - I'm from Boston and quite used to urban settings. But I just didn't have a good feeling about it.

I told her, "let's turn off here, I don't wanna get robbed."

She objected, "But you're supposed to protect me!"

A few seconds passed. I looked into her eyes and smirked a little.

"I am."


Nov 27, 2015

My girlfriend stole my supplements because she thought I was having too much and I would get fat. She gave them to her sister's boyfriend. I bought more. She took them again and gave them to another friend. I got angry. I told her "we need to talk." She sent her parents to my place to set me straight. Should I dump her?

Her heart may be in the right place, even tho her brain is in a really, really bad neighborhood.

I would give the relationship a 2 week break (no dating other people), then meet to talk, and if she is unable to get the basic relationship boundaries at that time, cut her loose.

Oh, and she owes you some supplements.


Nov 28, 2015

What triggers Rene Descartes to develop his own mathematics?

Descartes was seized by the notion that he could improve on Euclid.

Euclid had built a mathematical system of figures in space, geometry (literally : the measure of Earth.). Euclid's basic terms were spacial : point, line, circle, sphere, etc.

Descartes saw geometry as a subset of arithmetic. Descarte's vocabulary was number and numerical operations. The Cartesian axes served as the bridge between number and geometrical figure.

Number took dominion of space.


Nov 29, 2015

I am a high school student, and I have successfully managed to calculate the function to get the volume of a four-dimensional sphere. Will I have a good future in mathematics?

I don't mean to burst your bubble. Your discovery shows imagination and initiative. If you like this sort of thing, by all means pursue mathematics.

Your discovery is within the grasp of most bright and motivated high school students who are mathematically inclined.

It does sound that you should be in a more challenging course of study.


Dec 1, 2015

My girlfriend says that because she lives in my apartment, it is hers just as much as it is mine and she can do whatever she wants. Is she right?

Yup.

Doesn't matter who's paying the rent.

Either meet in the middle or collide off-center.


Dec 1, 2015

How do I hold a candle next to her ex?

What?

That guy just struck out.

You're at bat. Mind your stance. Choke up on that bat.

Here's the wind up and the pitch - don't take your eye off the ball.


Dec 3, 2015

Why is (-pi/2)*i not equal to (3pi/2)*i?

Because -1/2 != 3/2.

However, if we raise both sides to e power, we do have e^(- 1/2 pi i) = e ^ (3/2 pi i).

So why can't we just take logs of both sides and get the identity you seek? Because in the complex plane, e^x is not invertible, so
ln(x) is not a proper function.

The fly in the ointment is that e^x = e ^ (x + n 2 pi) for any integer n. So every e^x has infinitely many inverses - one for each choice of n.


Dec 7, 2015

Why would a girl react like this? A girl whom I know in passing and I were in the elevator together when she commented on her phone not getting a signal. I went onto explain how the elevator works as a faraday cage. She seemed annoyed.

I don't think she was reacting to you at all.

When she said, "I don't know why my phone isn't getting a signal", she was expressing her exasperation ("I don't know why you always have to park there") rather than asking for a reason.

Then she looked at you, exasperated, because she already was exasperated.


Dec 8, 2015

My girlfriend checked my phone without my permission and saw a photo of me dancing with another girl in a club. She got upset and told me this. What should my reaction be?

The unfortunate truth is that this isn't he first time she's creeped your phone, laptop, and God knows what else.

This is just the first time she's confronted you with it.

The problem is she violated (actually has a pattern of violating) your privacy and trust to satisfy her own insecurities.

A trust, once broken, may be repaired - but she is the only one who can do it.

If she acknowledges her behavior, is honest and introspective about it, you two have a chance.

If, however, she blames you (I had a hunch and I was right!) or she insists only on servicing her insecurity (so who is she ?!) then you are doomed. Sadly, the latter two is most probable for someone who did what she did.

She will always see you as a cheater and liar. She will always treat you like one. She won't even question her own motives.


Dec 8, 2015

What are some useful skills I can learn in minutes?

You can write backwards (if you're right-handed.)

Grab two markers and a white board. Hold a marker in each hand and place them together on the board. Write with your right hand, and make mirror-image movements with your left.

Your left-hand will catch on instantly. Presto! - you can write backwards (and left-handed!)


Dec 8, 2015

If n is a whole number, why can every natural number be written as the sum of distinct numbers in the form of 2n?

Because any number can be written in binary.


Dec 9, 2015

How do Jews feel about Eric Cartman, in the “South Park” TV series? He has on numerous occasions worshiped Adolf Hitler, and shown a tendency to support The Holocaust. His spite toward Jewish ethnicity is perpetuated with racist comments.

Kyle put it best. Cartman's a "fat, racist, self-centered, intolerant, manipulative sociopath." The Death of Eric Cartman

He is prejudice personified, unmasked in all its ugliness. As such his character is probably the most powerful condemnation of bigotry in any popular media.


Dec 10, 2015

Is it better to wait for a girl to ask me out since I've been seen as desperate for asking them out myself?

OK, hang on.

In the first 60 seconds you say you lose any chance with her.

How could you possibly - wait. You're not ... asking her out in the first minute are you?

If so, I think it's clear what you're problem is. You're coming in a bit ... too hot.


Dec 18, 2015

What are some unintentionally rude things people say and do?

So what ... erm ... nationality are you? A uniquely American question, always asked of me by a white person of European descent trying to discern the lineage leading to my swarthy complexion.

South America? Italian? Greek? Jewish? Arab?

Makes me feel like I'm "white-but-on-probation."

I still have yet to think of a snappy comeback.


Dec 31, 2015

How would you feel about being asked to reformat 10, 000 lines of code?

I'd be ecstatic.

I'd grab a pretty-printing reformatted, and reformat the code into *any* standard format.

Then I'd write a script to convert from that now-srandard script to the required format.

I'd then use the other seven weeks to job hunt.


Dec 31, 2015

Is it wasteful that many top chess players and mathematicians use their intellectual gift on their professions?

Often : yes. Mathematicians and chess masters pursue virtuosity for its own sake. That is, they pursue problems because they are very hard. It *is* impressive*, much like a wealthy person purchasing something simply because it's expensive. Like a $100,000 bottle of wine.

But there is something hollow and unimaginative about it. They've climbed a mountain nobody else could, but :

"Talent hits a target nobody else can hit.

Genius hits a target nobody else can see." -- Schopenhauer


Jan 5, 2016

How do inequalities work for complex numbers?

In general, there is no proper 'ordering' of the RxR plane (such that each member is strictly above or below each other member.)


Jan 8, 2016

I am considered vastly more intelligent than almost every person I encounter. How can I prevent people from being blinded by an intelligence aura at first encounter?

Understand, dear Questioner, that you are the one who is blinded.

I once had the good fortune to meet Sheldon Glashow. Nobel-prize-in-physics Sheldon Glashow. That Sheldon Glashow.

He had no 'intelligence aura'. His speech was not buried in pedantry. He was ordering a bagel, and talking about light. How we build walls to block it off, and then systems to regenerate it inside. He spoke plainly. Simply. He was full of insight.

He was not concerned with his own intelligence, which is of the sort that comes along perhaps 50 times per century. A person of his caliber doesn't need to be, and I'm sure bores of the topic very quickly. He was not interested in my intelligence either.

He was interested, at that moment, in people and their relation to light.

Blinded? I've never seen someone so clearly.


Jan 9, 2016

Why shall judaism be perceived and prosecuted only as an organized capital crime?

Happy New Year, Serge.


Jan 9, 2016

My girlfriend told me that she is going to meet her ex-boyfriend in a hotel room for 2 nights and 1 day to end everything between them and she said that she will not break my trust. What should I do?

"I'm heading to the bank. I'm bringing a gun and a ski mask I'm just going to close my account. I'll be back in 3 days."

She's full of crap. Eject and let her sort her life out.


Jan 11, 2016

Since humans are slower and weaker than some predators, why has no animal evolved to prey on humans?

DNA adapts over generations.

Intelligence adapts in real time.

It's no competition.


Jan 22, 2016

If you realized you were dating a narcissist, would you try to break up with him/her? Why?

I've said this elsewhere on Quora, but I suppose it bears repeating here.

Sure, narcissism is a real thing. But as used in modern parlance, even by many psychiatric professionals, it is meaningless. And more than this :

Almost invariably, the person who accuses another of being a narcissist is the one engaging in narcissism. Narcissus of ancient Greek mythology was staring at his own reflection.

Watch people and listen. Note the ones who keep using the term "narcissist." Draw your own conclusions.

In my experience, the phrase "you're a narcissist!" is almost always pop psychology window dressing for "pay attention to me!".


Jan 26, 2016

What e-liquids are best? Where can I find them?

My favorite supplier is Mount Baker Vapor.

They are high quality, American made, and so inexpensive you can experiment like crazy.


Jan 28, 2016

How do I deal with people who are trying to take advantage of my kindness? My colleague said I'm a pushover. I don't know how to say no.

I think this is hard to learn for a lot of people.

I would add to Franklin Veaux 's excellent answer a trick that I've picked up along the way.

For example, I do a lot of pro bono work on people's laptops and cell phones. So I keep an informal "favor schedule." And I spend a moderate, manageable amount of time on it each day.

And I've found it helps to give others a glimpse of that schedule, especially a the trade-offs you are making - whether you are telling them yes or no.

"Chris, can you root android?" "Not now, Steve bricked his phone so I need to get him working."

"Chris - I bricked my phone! Can you help?" "Sure - Ted wanted his Android rooted but that can wait."


Feb 1, 2016

I recently found out my boyfriend of 2 years looks up his ex on social media often, along with other girls. Is this a normal thing for guys to do or should I be worried? I talked to him about it and he said he was bored.

That's normal.

Now I have to ask - how do you know this? Did you access his FB account without his knowledge?

If so you have committed a deep betrayal of his trust.

That's not normal.


Feb 3, 2016

How can I word my issue to my boyfriend so he understands, from a mans point of view? Every time I mention my feelings his automatic response is always “You shouldn't feel that way, that's not what I meant, why would you feel that, etc”.

This is probably going to sound a little ... male. But you did ask for a male's perspective.

The 20th century pop-psychology movement produced a very unhealthy, even toxic notion : My feelings are valid.

And especially, "You must validate my feelings!" It's going to seem like I'm parsing language, but I'm actually going somewhere with this so please bear with me.

Feelings are emotional states. They describe your interior world. "Valid" means true. It describes the external world. Feelings, being internal, are neither true nor false. Neither valid nor invalid. They just are.

Feelings are an adjective. Almost always a single word. I feel happy, sad, anxious, confident, uncomfortable, uncertain, etc.

As such, you absolutely have a right to them. Nobody can or should doubt you when you say you feel a certain way.

Thoughts are very, very different. Thoughts make an assertion about the outside world, and other people. They address the exterior. "You don't care about me, you are lusting after my sister, nobody appreciates me" etc.

This is what the vast majority of people who demand their feelings be validated are actually talking about. They want their thoughts validated. But thoughts, being external, may not be valid. You don't have a right to demand others adopt them. You do not have a right to your own reality.

We disguise thoughts as feelings most often by prepending the phrase "I feel" to any statement. "I feel you don't appreciate me", etc. You have no right to that belief. It shouldn't be validated. "I feel insecure with you" - sure. A fine but crucial distinction.

When we demand others validate our thoughts simply because we think them; we have regressed to an infantile state which rejects the real world and replaces it with a fantasy of our own invention, to serve our emotional needs.

Far from being psychologically healthy, we have taken the first step towards psychotic : rejecting reality out of pure selfishness.


Feb 7, 2016

If I don't want to go on a second date with a guy, should I pay him back for my half of the date? I told him that I didn’t want to go out again, and now he's unfriended me on facebook and keeps sending me Venmo requests for half the cost of the meal.

Send him a check with "Dick filtering fee" written in the memo.


Feb 11, 2016

My boyfriend went through several hundred of my photos and threw away every single one with an ex-boyfriend in it. What does that mean?

You must leave him, as others say.

You need give him no further explanation than a stack of all the photos of you two.


Feb 21, 2016

My significant other's ex is coming into town and he/she wants to go out to dinner with them alone. How would you react?

Me? I would be surprised, even panicked. This calls for immediate action.

This is one of the most important moments in the relationship. It is critical not to screw it up.

I think I would say, "Ah. It's always bitter sweet to spend time with an ex-. I hope it goes well for both of you and you have a nice time." Something like that.

I would be anxious to be ... calm. Supportive. Secure. Non possessive.

She had a long past before me, and has a big world beyond me. Love denies neither.


Feb 27, 2016

Why life, why Earth, why humans, why now, why me?

The only observed universe is the one that creates an observer.


Apr 8, 2016

If you could write a letter to an extraterrestrial race before they meet us, what would you write?

We recently stumbled out of caves and ice.

We need help.

Please disable our weapons and help us build a system that meets the physical needs of our species and protects our ecosystem.


Apr 30, 2016

What is your favorite scene in South Park?

It's simple. Vulgar and simple. That's the genius of it. It is Cartman, of course. He is in class, and expresses his contempt for the teacher.

The teacher challenges him to repeat the insult : "What did you say !?"

Cartman produces a bullhorn, turns it on, and utters the immortal phrase,

"How would you like to suck my balls, Mr. Garrison?"


Apr 30, 2016

I smoke 2 boxes everyday. I cannot stop smoking. What should I do to stop smoking?

If nothing else works, I would recommend you try vaping (e-cigarettes). Although it hasn't been clinically proven to be an effective nicotine replacement therapy (yet), I and many others found the switch easy - even preferable - after decades of heavy smoking.


May 4, 2016

Should Top Writers be picked by the community rather than Quora itself?

No. That would be a Pop Writer. It would lead to people gaming the social system for maximum popularity, and Quora would devolve into a publicity platform. The most important service the TW serves is to highlight little known users who are awesome despite low numbers.


May 6, 2016

Looking for a really good E-juice to buy online.. What is your personal favorite brand or flavor?

The best value IMO is Mount Baker Vapors. My fav flavor is Blood Orange.

For a little more money, my fav is Johnson Creek's Wisconsin Frost.


May 11, 2016

Is Tom Brady right that you shouldn't cook with raw olive oil? If so, why not?

Now, this is nonsense, there is nothing unhealthy about iodized salt or olive oil.

As a rule of thumb, anytime both 'pink' and 'Himalayan' modify the same noun you can stop reading.


May 13, 2016

What don’t people do in zombie apocalypse movies that you would do?

I have to credit my good friend Phil Wyman for this :

Head north. Way north. Into Canada.

Get yourself, your posse, and your disheveled-but-still-gorgeous love interest above the Snow line.

Zombies freeze.

Fin.


May 13, 2016

What are the best free web hosting services?

Here's a neat trick using dropbox.

It's great for getting stuff up to the web under a unique domain name, with zero hassles, zero expense, and without using git which - I’ll say it - is the most screwed up, over-engineered, counter-intuitive, error-prone, bizarre contravention of rational thought to ever …

Ahem. Sorry.

There is the caveat that you can't have any server-side scripting. The pages served up our static, but(!) that does not mean your site is static. You can still use client-side templating like Handlebars and a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) tool like Parse . In this way, you can do pretty much anything a dynamic back-end can do.

Anyway, put your site into dropbox. Then go to Home | DropPages.com. It's free to sign up. Follow the instructions there to synch up your dropbox folder.

Droppages will let you use a domain like http://droppages.digmysite.com .

Dropbox automatically tracks changes, and Droppages synchs up (well, it's supposed to, I've had issues with that. But I’ve never kicked puppies like a typical git user is often seen to do.)


May 13, 2016

What is the best you can create with machine language?

A C-compiler so you can write a Lisp interpreter so you never have to write machine code again.


May 13, 2016

Should footers at the end of answers on Quora with self-promotion of a business or a website be banned, or should this style of answer be reported by readers as spam even if the answer was helpful?

Meh. While overt promoting - like working your business into your answer - is best avoided, nothing wrong with plugging your site/book/diner/whatever in your signature.

A bumper sticker doesn't disrupt traffic.


May 15, 2016

What should I do if my parents are installing a security camera in my bedroom?

You can and should put a stop to this right away.

This is not a request on your part, rather it is a demand. You’re not asking.

Demanding is not something a teenage daughter normally does with her parents. It’s good to let an authority figure do it for you.

Are you afraid of your Dad? If not - invite him to discuss it with you and a counselor at school. The mere prospect of this may change his mind.

If you are afraid of him, go speak to the counselor first and make sure s/he understands your fear.

In addition to this, there are a number of ways to hack a hidden surveillance cam.

For 20 bucks, you can buy a device that detects the wifi signal coming from one :

P3 International P7030 Electronic Gadgets

For 5 bucks, you can buy an app that uses the flash on your phone to find the thing.

Hidden Camera Detector on the App Store

Yes, these purchases require a credit card, but you can walk into a CVS or lot of other stores and buy a pre-paid credit card.

If you find a camera, remember that you have the option to be … a little crafty. Sure, you can smash it with a brick. But you can also cause it to slowly fail, requiring your father to return to it repeatedly.

Give the camera lens a quick, very thin blast of hair spray. Enough so the lightest possible mist hits it. That stuff will stick and dry there. (Of course, best to do this in pitch darkness so he can’t see.)

Repeat the next day. Each day the image will get worse and worse.

If he repairs it, repeat. Try superglue on the lense. Finally, submerge it in sugar water. You can have him tinkering with it endlessly. You could even hide your phone in your room so that it records him doing it and post the video to -

Ahem. On second thought, sweet though revenge is, it would probably be best just to take the camera to your counselor the next day.


May 15, 2016

If 1=5, 2=10, 3=15 4=20 then 5=?

The ‘=’ can be taken to mean ‘equivalent mod 4’ , that is, divide both sides by 4 and take the remainder.

So 5 (= mod 4) 1. 5 also ‘equals’ 9, 13, 17,21,25 …


May 15, 2016

What's Aleksey Vayner up to these days?

Sadly, his death seems a likely suicide-by-overdose.

The Daily Mail (UK) isn’t the most reputable source, but in this case they reference Aleksey’s Facebook wall, which must have been wide open to verification - at least to his FB friends.

The Yale student who catapulted to Internet infamy with a disastrous video resume he sent to a prospective employer has reportedly died at his home in Queens, New York after a friend sent him desperate messages on Facebook asking him to 'pick up the phone' and think of his mother.

On Jan. 18, the night before his death, a friend wrote on Vayner's Facebook wall, 'Do not, anyone, sell this idiot ANY pills!.' This rest of the post is written in Russian and says, 'Damned egoist, pick up the phone, who's going to take care of mom? [you could] sell your source code and f**k off to costa rica. [even] paypal would pay you 2-3 hundred thousand. pick up the phone, bastard.'
In response, just before midnight, Vayner angrily wrote back to his Facebook friend by responding 'Volodia, go to hell' in Cyrillic.

A man matching Vayner's description under the name of Alex Stone died at 8 a.m. on January 19th at Jamaica Hospital, Queens

'Do not, anyone, sell this idiot ANY pills!' The desperate last messages to former Yale student infamous for 'Impossible is Nothing' résumé who is reportedly 'dead at age 29 from an overdose'


May 19, 2016

Datatables.org is down for almost 24hrs now and all community data tables from YQL are down with it. Does anyone know something about it?

All of YQL seems down now (May 19) …


May 25, 2016

How do you spot a beginner programmer?

They are the first to install a major OS upgrade, excitedly announcing it’s going to be “way faster and more stable. Especially the 64-bit version.”


May 26, 2016

I'm trying to find the original source of a semi-famous RFK quote from one of his speeches: “I have a speech which it is my responsibility to give, and you have a responsibility to listen to it. If you finish before I do, however, please let me know.” What speech does this come from?

I can only find a couple of sources referring to an unspecified “talk before a group of students.” It seems likely the attribution to RFK is purely apocryphal. Made up, even.

By the way, I found these sources by using phrase search in Google. Not everyone knows about it. By surrounding a phrase in quotes, Google will only look for that precise phrase, not its component words.

Googling : rfk I have a speech which it is my responsibility to give

yielded nothing, but -

Googling : rfk "I have a speech which it is my responsibility to give"

turned up Humorous Quotes of Robert F Kennedy @ WorkingHumor.com and

How higher education can work with foundations to meet the needs of America in the 21st century.


May 30, 2016

How can I display linux processes information with syscall?

ps -ef | grep nnnn where nnnn is the process ID.

For extra credit you can tighten up ‘nnnnn’ to regular expression which ensures you are matching the second field in a white-space-delimited string.


May 31, 2016

Why does vaping give me migraines?

It seems likely you may be allergic to a common ingredient of e-cigs, Propylene Glycol. Common symptoms of this allergy include sore throat, sinus problems and headache.

PG amounts vary greatly (down to zero), which could explain why you experience this problem just part of the time.

There are many PG-free (Vegetable Glycerin only) juices you can try.

Oh - and vaping can easily dehydrate you. A tall (non alcoholic) drink is recommended alongside your vape. Dehydration can cause headaches too.


Jun 2, 2016

My friend defends Hitler as though he was a good person and Germany invading most of Europe was justified. Is he right? And he thinks FDR was a bad president.

No, of course Hitler wasn’t a “good person” and Germany’s invasions weren’t justified.

The Versailles Treaty was completely null and void by 1938 - before any Germans crossed a neighbor’s border. Hitler had openly re-armed at this point and hadn’t paid any reparations in years.

It can reasonably argued that some of Germany’s pre-WWI territory should be restored. Especially the Sudetenland and perhaps some access to East Prussia through the Polish corridor. It may have been wise to create an international city out of Danzig. Certainly, singling out Germany alone as the perpetrator of World War One was unfair.

But that’s about all you can say. Had Germany won the first world war, she would have been in possession of great swaths of territory and would scoff at any notion of their return. This was a war among empires, a war of expansion.

We can also grant that Germany didn’t want war with England or France. While revenge for the first war is sweet, Hitler regarded England as Aryan cousins. He wanted England to be the Aryan guardian of the Atlantic. Most importantly, it just wasn’t in Hitler’s strategic interest to attack in the West. His plans were in the other direction.

Hitler makes it clear in Mein Kampf that he plans to expand East, toppling governments and enslaving people as he goes. Into Poland and the USSR. That he plans to get rid of the Jews (one way or another) and conquer the Slavic untermensch.

When Hitler invaded Poland, France and Britain immediately declared War. Hitler was stunned and terrified. He is said to have received the news by sitting in silence, wide eyed, motionless, the color drained from his face.

So we can say that no, Hitler didn’t war in the West. He was hoping that Britain and France would stand down.

But no peaceful man, no sane man would systematically kill civilians in death factories. No healer of war wounds would invade Austria, Poland, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium ,Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Hungary, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Great Britain (Channel Islands), and a good chunk of North Africa.

Hitler’s malevolent plans to the East were always clear.

As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them as we see fit, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitants and civilising them, goes straight off into a concentration camp!

Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations. Enigma Books.

There is just no reading of history that redeems even a small part of Adolf Hitler.


Jun 4, 2016

Would you rather be utterly heartbroken, or single?

Heartbroken by a mile.

As in all things, we must turn to South Park for eternal wisdom.

Butters girlfriend has left him :

“I got dumped. And yea, I’m sad! But at the same time I’m really happy that something can make me feel so sad. It makes me feel alive, y’know? It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now, is if I felt something really good before, so I have to take the good with the bad. So I guess what I’m feeling is, like, a beautiful sadness.”


Jun 5, 2016

Will i attract the fbi's attention if I post a picture on instagram supporting the animal libertarian front?

Quite possibly.

Whatever your (or my) personal beliefs, this group engages in illegal activity and is on the radar of law enforcement.


Jun 5, 2016

I recently heard this flat-earth argument: "If the Earth were spinning 1,000 mph, a hovering helicopter would get left behind as the Earth rotated away underneath it, or it could simply wait for its destination to come to it." How do I respond?

I think the Flat Earther’s have a damn good point.

Empiricists are the worst kind of hypocrite. They insist that we gain knowledge of the world through experiment. But not that’s not what they mean.

Have you measured the number of hydrogen atoms per gram? No - you let somebody else do it. You have no idea how to do it. But you trust that somebody else does. And the people whose job it is to check that person. And so on.

In the end, for all their empirical bluster, their world-view is based on appeal to authority. They don’t want you to do an experiment at all. They want you to shut up and believe that others did.

So you learn the conservation of energy. Which others have confirmed exhaustively always hold. Oh - except that time when it didn’t - that quantum foam thing. Sorry. It’s complicated.

Screw the faux-empiricists. Let’s have a counter-empiricist revolution. Instead of listening to others, we’re actually gonna do our own damn experiments. Literally. Ourselves. Empirically.

Now, it’s not a reasonable project to try and weigh a hydrogen atom. Or detect quantum-level energy spikes.

But somebody asserts that the earth is (nearly) a sphere. It seems the earth is too large, but - hey. Think it over. You can get in a car. You can get in a plane.

The Ancient Greeks figured out how to do it on foot - but don’t look it up!

OK. Maybe you’re on a big ball. Maybe it’s flat. You have your mind, your eyes, your feet, maybe a car. You have everything you need - for yourself - to figure this out.

No matter what I say, the Flat-Earther’s say, the books say, the Ancient Greeks say. This is one experiment where you can go find out and tell us.

That - and only that - is science.


Jun 5, 2016

How can people claim America is the best country in the world when it is time after time a place of deep hatred and intolerance?

Not a question. You’re soap-boxing.

Marking as insincere.


Jun 5, 2016

What are the chances we will get back together? Advice would be great

In my experience (I’m old-ish), most breakups don’t stick. About half the time they get reversed within a week.

The breakdown seems to be something like this -

Within one day after breakup, chance = 25%

Within the first 3 days, chance = 34%

After 3 days, there is a long tail.

Within the first week, chance = 50%

Within the first month, chance = 54.6 %

And so on, with a lifetime chance of 57.1%.

If you want to save the relationhip, not the importance of doing it in the first 3 days or at least the first week.


Jun 6, 2016

What are some secret things geniuses do to solve problems—techniques anyone can apply?

Don’t try a problem nobody has solved.

Solve a problem nobody has tried.


Jun 7, 2016

Why did Linus Torvalds give a middle finger to Nvidia during a conference?

The other answers give the main reason : that Nvidia was uncooperative in the integration of their cards into Linux (the “worst company” in Torvald’s words.)

As for the specifics - why the bird, in front of everyone? It seems quite plausible that this was a brilliant piece of theatre by Linus. Linus is clearly aware of the camera directly in front of him. His eyes hint at benevolent mischief. He is dressed and coiffed well - camera-ready as ever.

This - stunt? - occurred in summer of 2012. It was covered by Wired, Ars Technica, Valley Wag, Business Insider, The Verge, Gizmodo, and so on.

The flip heard round the world.

18 months later, Nvidia starting contributing to Linux’s code base. Torvalds gave them a “thumbs up” in the press.

While I’m not certain all of this was by design, if anyone can leverage the mind-hive to collaborate for the greater good - it’s Linus Torvalds.


Jun 7, 2016

Why wasn't Big Ben bombed by the Germans during the Blitz in WW2?

I don’t see this mentioned, so I’ll add one point to the other excellent answers :

Pilots would often avoid landmarks - especially cathedrals and towers - so they can be used to aid navigation.

This was back before ground-radar, GPS and all that good stuff. It would be easy for a bomber, trying to avoid being shot down, to get disoriented - especially at night or in the fog. Nothing like a beacon in the sky.

So if bombers had a choice, they would often tend to avoid such landmarks as a courtesy to their fellows and to aid in their next attack.


Jun 8, 2016

What can I do if the police reveal my name and contact number to a neighbor whose dog I complained about?

Nothing really. You didn't drop a dime on a meth lab, you complained about your neighbor’s dog. You can't expect to do that anonymously. In fact, your first call should have been to them, not the police.


Jun 8, 2016

What are some wise quotes that you've seen or heard? Can you post the pictures?

My favorite is from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,

I saw it first on a bumper sticker for sale in Cambridge, MA years ago.


Jun 8, 2016

What do you think is the future of vaping?

In a few years, overwhelming evidence will emerge that vaping is a safe and incredibly effective nicotine replacement therapy for smokers.

The medical community will come out strongly in favor of smokers trying it.

Rates of lung cancer, lung- and heart-disease will drop.

The FDA will back down as tax-payers insist it go make itself useful somewhere.


Jun 8, 2016

How can I make Velcro less sticky?

I had a flash of inspiration and it worked! Rub a cotton ball against the ‘hooked’ (non-fuzzy) side. The hooks grab cotton and lessen their grip on another surface.

More cotton for less grip, comb cotton put for more.


Jun 9, 2016

Why is it that I get abused as a software engineering employee but respected as a software engineering contractor?

Your boss usually doesn’t pay you out his/her pocket. A client usually does.

Nothing illuminates your value more than writing a check.


Jun 10, 2016

Which functions are faster and reliable PHP vs. LINUX?

I think you’ll find there is negligible performance difference between PHP copy, bash cp, and any other language or command for that matter.

The speed is bound by the file system.


Jun 13, 2016

My Bible teacher said that God accelerated the formation of the Earth to make it look like 4.5 billion years old. How can I refute that claim?

God created the Earth. And the Bible.

One of them is lying. Which one?

(Hint - one of them is also the work of Man.)


Jun 13, 2016

Why did it take so long for the machine gun to be used in war?

To add a bit of context to User ‘s answer, it can take a long time before gun technology becomes battle-ready.

A gun on the battle-field has to deal with moisture, dirt, soot, temperature extremes and all sorts of wear.

As a simpler example, consider barrel rifling (where we get the word ‘rifle’). These are the turning threads in the barrel that set the bullet spinning so it is much more accurate. Rifling technology existed since the 1600’s.

But it was only used sparingly on the battle-field - usually only for snipers. The reason was that it was a fussy technology; the ball had to fit tightly into the barrel, making it hard to load. Dirt and soot would get caught in the grooves. It wasn’t until the American Civil war and the invention of the French Minie Ball that rifled barrels were widely used in battle (causing enormous casualties on both sides.)

Minie Ball. Note the hollow bottom; it expands when fired to grip the rifling threads.

Similarly with the machine gun. The Ager gun was in use during the American Civil war, but it was heavy and complicated. In use it was likely to jam, break down or over-heat. And then of course there is the problem of supplying ammunition.

Civil War Ager “Coffee Mill” gun.

Like barrel rifling, it took many refinements before this clunky thing was fit for battle. The machine gun wouldn’t really make its deadly debut until WW I.

British Machine Gun, Vickers (1916)


Jun 13, 2016

I got a job offer from a Series B stealth startup telling me to "pick my salary." How do I do that?

“I’ll take yours. What is it?”

Don’t tip your hand. It’s the employer that proposes a dollar amount.


Jun 21, 2016

Why did Russians fight so poorly during WW2?

The question can be turned around to : Why did the Germans fight so well during WW II ?

One answer : Years of preparation. Hitler assumed total power in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of boys were inducted into the Hitler Youth. By 1936, membership for Aryan boys was compulsory.

The Hitler Youth’s sole purpose was to create soldiers. Boys were physically trained and ideologically indoctrinated.

They were brought up to throw themselves into battle with no thought of their own lives. It was customary for the Hitler Youth to raise the Swastika flag at dawn, and sing “Morgenrot, Morgenrot, Leuchtest mir zum frühen tod” (Red sunrise, red sunrise, you guide me to an early death.”)

In 1936, this is how every 13 year old boy in the country began his day. That boy would be 18 by the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

By all allied accounts these German troops were the most dangerous soldiers ever encountered.

This intense preparation of the youth of Germany was combined with Germany’s superlative technical prowess, newly evolved tactics, and yes - amphetamines - to create the perfect killing machine.


Jun 22, 2016

What should Hillary Clinton be doing differently to maximize her chances of defeating Donald Trump?

Don’t react to him. Don’t let him set the agenda. Run as if there is no opponent - just hit your talking points and promote your agenda.

In the debates respond to the moderators but do not take the bait when Trump fires a question or accusation. Let Trump make all the noise he wants while you maintain your poise and demonstrate your knowledge, experience and integrity.

You don’t have to defeat Trump in order to win. Trump will defeat himself. Stay out of his way and let him.


Jun 29, 2016

Guys, what are the small things your girlfriend/wife/SO does that you like the best?

When I lose, her encouragement does not waver.


Jul 3, 2016

What are the growth stages of a programmer?

Footling student. All the world is new, all mysterious. Your first steps, between falls, quickly transport you elsewhere.

Master of algorithms. The building blocks of algorithms. : Loops, branches and so on are applied without thought. Speed, simplicity, memory economy are your treasures..

Disciple of objects:. As your programs get bigger, you realize that you'll never actually write a complex algorithm. Rather, a huge zoo of simple algorithms. To manage this complexity, inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism become your holy Trinity.

Funtional human. Your objects are great but something is missing. They can't play chess or speak English. And inheritance easily gets out of hand. Loops are crude and banal. Side-effects are heresy. To iterate is human, to reverse is divine.

You realize that in all this time, you're not any more productive than when you were Master of Algorithms. In fact, you've spent an embarrassing percentage of time trying to backfit natural notions into Functional or Object Oriented paradigms. You wonder if there usnt something you missed, in the very beginning.

Footling student. .All the world is new ...

* At any time, it is possible the coder has joined a cult called Design Patterns. The net effect is, once rescued and deprogrammed, they resume at whatever stage they left off.


Jul 6, 2016

How can someone predict the future with mathematics?

It hasn’t been done yet successfully.

To clarify - cliodynamics is about long-term, global predictions in geopolitics. ‘”Predicting history.” There have been many, mostly unsuccessful attempts to find cycles and arcs that govern economies and empires.

Recently Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut has breathed new life into the field. His idea is now that so much of history has been digitized, there is a sort of critical mass of data that could yield accurate models of the future.

I have found it often pays to go right to the source. I am usually surprised at how helpful they are. I’ve emailed Prof. Turchin and asked him to answer your question directly.

(Edit - Prof. Turchin was kind enough to respond to my inquiry in just a few hours. Here’s his response to your question)

Fortunately, I can quickly address both issues, as I have written blog posts about them. First, on how to become a “cliodynamicist”:
http://peterturchin.com/blog/2013/05/01/how-to-become-a-cliodynamicist/
Second:
Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy
http://peterturchin.com/blog/2013/04/12/scientific-prediction≠prophecy/
And more fun here:
http://peterturchin.com/blog/2014/12/10/its-tough-to-make-predictions-especially-about-the-future/
Best wishes,
PT

— Professor Peter Turchin, University of Connecticut. Peter Turchin

Personally, I find Turchin especially interesting due to his prolific output in the most prestigious academic journals and also for his interdisciplinary qualifications. At UConn he teaches for four departments : Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Mathematics and Anthropology.


Jul 6, 2016

What do great programmers know that average programmers don't?

There is no such thing as a good time estimate.

If progress is linear over time, you are working at too low a level of abstraction. You are repeating yourself and moving too slow, writing too much code, and introducing bugs. You haven't abstracted out redundancy.

The best, fastest way to write good code is to discover the best abstractions, the best supporting tools - go build it, fire it up, and see what's broken.

If you already know know how long this will take, you must be invoking some notion like, "Well, I have five X-parts, and an X-part takes a week. So five weeks ...". Don't grind out five variants of X. Make one meta-X. You'll write less code. Easier to maintain. Fewer bugs. Instead of five weeks you'll spend ... two? Three? Almost certainly less but you don't know yet, do you? That's the point I'm trying to make.

A good plan is not predictable and a predictable plan is not good.


Jul 7, 2016

If Canada were to be attacked right now, what would USA do?

The USA would go stark raving batshit and unleash about 50 Megatons of freedom on the attacker.


Jul 8, 2016

Do you think that killing those police officers in Dallas marginalized the death of Alton Sterling?

No. Rather, it marginalized life itself.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." — John Donne, 1624

Jul 8, 2016

Does a policeman have the authority to tell you to disobey the law (ie. don't stop at a stop sign)?

No - you only have to obey lawful orders.

But the traffic laws in every state make heavy use of the phrase, “Unless otherwise directed by a police officer or traffic control signal.”

For example, in California,

The driver of any vehicle, the person in charge of any animal, any pedestrian, and the motorman of any streetcar shall obey the instructions of any official traffic signal applicable to him and placed as provided by law, unless otherwise directed by a police or traffic officer or when it is necessary for the purpose of avoiding a collision or in case of other emergency, subject to the exemptions granted by Section 21055.
CA Codes (veh:21450-21468)

So when a cop waves you through a red light it’s a lawful order.


Jul 8, 2016

What do you expect from a professional social network? (e.g. Linkedin)

Not much. That’s why I think Microsoft’s acquisition was ill-advised.

We want a minimal social network for professionals. Just the basics : Add-friend, message, status stream, in-mail.

And nothing else, at all.

Privacy is a huge concern. A misdirected message could get you fired. It’s a place most people go with the utmost caution. We don’t want bells and whistles going off. We don’t want videos. We barely want photo-sharing.

We don’t want integration. Not with Outlook. Not with Powerpoint. Not with Word. The mere existence of these options would be worrisome. You’re updating your resume and accidentally share out the document with the board of directors. That sort of thing.

In fact, we want it walled way, way off. Walled off from Office. From Facebook. From Instagram and iTunes and Waze and Ashley Madison.

We don’t want an awesome professional network. We want one that’s simple, separate and secret.


Jul 12, 2016

What are the biggest facepalm moments you have ever experienced?

I attended Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT is home to a couple thousand deaf kids in the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

When I stepped into the elevator, I noticed there was braille next to each elevator button. For four years I assumed that was there for the deaf students.

The deaf students. For four years.


Jul 12, 2016

Why do people devalue software developers?

You get this from, er, what’s a nicer term for ‘amateurs’ ?

There are several considerations that I find clarify this sort of situation.

You should probably walk away without arguing, this group’s probability of success (considering they immediately fumbled the offer to you) is on par with winning the lottery. Buy a ticket instead and call it a day. Otherwise, the following three arguments apply :

You have written code successfully. Have they launched, marketed and funded products successfully?

You are being asked to make an investment. Coding time is worth money, and isn’t hard to sell. You’re kicking in essentially 10’s of thousands of dollars. Would they offer 3% for a round of seed funding?

“You know, don’t you, that The Social Network was a work of fiction?”


Jul 13, 2016

How do I explain to non-programmers how complex, time-consuming, and error-prone software development is?

Go to a familiar, ‘simple’ web site like Pandora.

Discuss what it appears made of, visually. That should take about a minute.

Now View/Source. Walk them through the Javascript includes. The CSS. The custom javascript. The cross-browser code. The flash fail-over code. The big tree of divs and spans. It’s over 7000 lines or so.

When you’re done with this, explain “unfortunately I have only been able to show you the part you see - the User Interface. We can’t see the back-end code, that actually chooses and streams the music.”


Jul 13, 2016

What is a good piece of random advice?

“Never try to out-stubborn a cat.” — Robert A. Heinlein


Jul 15, 2016

What do designers think of the Trump Pence logo?

I can’t look at it without thinking of Terrance and Philip from South Park.


Jul 17, 2016

How does inserting a new link works in linked lists?

Note that first is not declared inside the function insert. In fact its declaration isn’t shown. insert is (hopefully) an inline member function of an object class which defines the linked list. The first variable is presumably a member of the class. It would be nice to indicate that in the name - m_first or something.

Wherever the hell first comes from, it’s must have some value - it points to the top of the list (null if empty). So this function does two things - it inserts a new element at the top and it also redirects the first pointer to the newly added top. In other words

first -> [original-top-element]

newlink -> [original top-element]

first -> newlink -> original-top-element

first now points to the top of the list again.


Jul 18, 2016

I built an $80 million company at the age of 20 but had a 3.5 GPA in high school. Do I have a chance at Stanford?

Your success and breadth of experience - at such a young age and in such a bad economy, makes you a worthy applicant at any school, anywhere. I would not hesitate to apply to top schools everywhere - Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, MIT, etc.

Frankly they will be a little puzzled you want to go to school now (and a little flattered. Wozniak did the same thing, btw. Other people here are confused that you want to get your degree - don’t listen to them. Money is not an end in itself but a means to other ends - in this case, you want an education. Smart shopper, in my opinion.)

Universities will not fail to notice that you may be a generous alumni donor as well, and a helpful connection to your classmates in their careers.

You can probably write your own ticket : whisk through an abbreviated undergrad program and straight into a grad program, or create your own hybrid combination of majors.

This isn't nepotism, and it's not about money. You've earned it. Stanford would be lucky to have you and they know it.

Nothing succeeds like success.


Jul 19, 2016

If a cop pulls you over for speeding, should you admit to it or should you say I don't know?

A lawyer would tell you not to admit a thing.

Personally, in my (albeit limited) interactions with police, they really do seem to appreciate it when you’re being honest. They get lied to all day long. The officer almost certainly has you clocked and is writing you a ticket no matter what. If you’re honest, he probably won’t be a jerk while he’s doing it.

If you really want to score karma points, when he hands you the ticket you can say, “I’m not thrilled about the ticket, but I do appreciate that you’re out here keeping the roads safe. Stay safe yourself.”

That’s another thing they don’t hear much of. Even cops need a break sometimes.


Jul 19, 2016

What do you think about Melania Trump's speech at the RNC and the plagiarism accusations?

It is both perfectly understandable mistake and grave omen.

Trump doesn’t know anything about politics. He delegates what needs to be done. His job is just to be Trump.

So it’s easy to see what happened. Trump barks at an underling, “Write a speech for Malenia!” The underling thinks, “Um, OK. What do they typically say, anyway?” and googles “first lady convention speeches.” This would be the first link (since knocked into second place by the plagiarism scandal.) 5 Must-Read Quotes From the Speeches of First Ladies and First Lady Hopefuls

Yup, here’s Michelle’s speech, first paragraph,

"You work hard for what you want in life... your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do... you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them."

So the underling copies and pastes Michelle’s speech into an email, and sends it to another underling “who is a tremendous, amazing writer” (everyone around Trump has begun to talk like this.) With the unfortunate instruction, “Malenia needs a speech for the convention. Keep it brief and upbeat. Use this as a template.”

And guy #2 thinks the template is actually pretty good, makes a few small changes, and sends it to the teleprompter and to Malenia’s iPad.

A perfectly understandable, innocent mistake. The critical thing - the terrifying thing - is the task was kicked downstairs to clueless minions in the first place. And nobody (meaning Trump) cared what was actually said. Nobody checked.

The Trump campaign is phoning the whole thing in.

This isn’t hurricane Katrina. This is just a convention. To over-delegate, under-check and fuck this up indicates a level of detachment which is absolutely terrifying in a commander-in-chief.


Jul 20, 2016

Where is the mistake in this part of my C++ program (photo down below)?

[Edit - changing my answer].

To elaborate on Yunna Cui , John McLeod VII , and Robert Bennett ‘s essentially correct answer - you can’t declare a variable inside a case block. See Why can't variables be declared in a switch statement?

The reason is one of scope. The code within the switch statement is all considered the same sequential block of statements, with a Goto at the top which is jumping down to the right case label. This is the reason you have to use a break to exit the case - otherwise it just plows through to the next case. (This sample code actually makes use of this (otherwise bothersome) behavior where it interprets a lower case ’n’ or ‘j’ by just falling through to the next case.) The problem is the compiler is worried you might jump over the declaration to a line which references the variable. Technically - the compiler could just check that the variable is only referenced within that case-block but instead they just decided to enforce this rule.

So you have two choices - declare all variables before the switch or wrap {}’s around each case-block as Robert Bennett shows. The latter is more elegant in my opinion, the former may be slightly faster at run-time as it is more amenable to compiler-optimization.


Jul 21, 2016

Donald Trump has implied Ted Cruz's wife is unattractive, especially when compared with his own wife. Is this acceptable? Does it matter? Any lessons?

Trump is insecure.

Trump is profane.

Trump objectifies women.

Heidi Cruz has an MBA from Harvard.

Heidi held high level positions during W Bush’s first term, reporting directly to Condoleeza Rice.

Heidi was an investment banker at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

Heidi is way hotter than Ms. Trump.


Jul 23, 2016

"Dividing a string in a 3:2 ratio creates the interval we call the "fifth,". How do you divide a string in a 3:2 ratio?

It’s pretty certain the question pertains to the Perfect fifth interval in music theory, meaning two notes with a difference in pitch (frequency) of 3:2.

So, for example, if you had two strings on a guitar and tuned one of them to vibrate at 1 KHz (1000 vibrations per second) and the other to 1.5 KHz, they would make a perfect fifth since their pitch is a ratio of 1500:1000 = 3:2.

Physically, the strings aren’t cut into little pieces, rather they carry a standing wave which divides the string up into a whole number of segments (1,2,3 etc.)

The bottom two strings are vibrating in a 3:2 ratio so there is a perfect fifth interval between them.

The notes of a perfect fifth are pleasing to the ear - you can really hear when you’ve hit it. The knowledge of perfect fifth intervals is used to tune lots of string instruments.


Jul 23, 2016

How can I be a better programmer? I’m starting college and we need to learn Java. I’m feeling like I’m not good at all. I read the book, watch videos, and practice on CodeAcademy, but I’m not sure what else to do.

Take a break mid-day to meditate for 20 minutes.

Unless you don’t have time.

In which case you should meditate for an hour.


Jul 23, 2016

Why did digital picture frames fail? Why are people not buying it? What is missing?

Go into anyone's office. Look at the pictures they display. They will be of loved ones.

They aren't really for others to look at. Nor are they for their owner to look at. Rather, they signal a person's devotion to their deepest relationships.

Life-long relationships. Indelible. Permanent.

Like ink on paper.


Jul 24, 2016

Was Quora Moderation right to collapse Tom Higgins' Trump Parody?

I’ll confess to being the OP here, but for my money, Tom Higgins ‘ answer - in addition to being funny, is the most helpful, thoughtful and vivid answer to the question.

In light of Quora’s own statement here,

“Humorous answers and reviews are allowed if they make the page more helpful to someone who is sincerely interested in learning the answer to the question; otherwise they are not. Answers and Reviews that are intended as jokes are not helpful responses. In addition, humorous answers and reviews that deliberately misinterpret the intent of the question/topic will be collapsed.”

It seems that Higgin’s answer is way in the clear as it certainly makes the page more helpful to someone curious about “Trump’s overused language and turns of speech.”


Jul 28, 2016

I am a white person who does not believe in white privilege, am I racist?

No, you are not a racist. The term “white privilege” is very loaded, and is an ideological “brand” being promoted by certain elements of the Left. You do not have to subscribe to that notion and language. This doesn’t make you a racist, nor a Conservative, nor anything else.

There are people who believe that terminology is ineffective at advocating for the rights of black people. That it’s philosophically untenable. Some are even civil rights activists. And some are black.

Branding a dissenter a “racist” is a low-blow, ad hominem evasive tactic which puts the ‘brand’ before the rights of those it claims to defend.


Jul 29, 2016

Do white people (other than those in the infamous organization) like the KKK?

They are the single most reviled “political group” in America, and I use the phrase generously.


Aug 5, 2016

Is it better to use javascript to animate something or would you rather use CSS purely?

At first I use CSS3 animations, just because they are supposed to be the standard, ‘correct’ way to do it. Animations done this way will automatically benefit from improvements made to the browser itself.

Often, however, I find them too slow - especially on mobile. For these instances I use the awesome Javascript Greensock which is awesome in its awesomeness.


Aug 7, 2016

Who is going to the Top Writers NY Fall Meetup on Thursday, November 3, 2016?

Yes!


Aug 16, 2016

What are some of the most widely circulated fake pictures?

The raising of the American flag in Iwo Jima during World War II,

Later immortalized in bronze :

This was completely staged for the camera after the real flag-raising. The actual, first flag-raising on that defeated island used a smaller flag which wouldn’t sink properly into the rocky ground, making for a less photogenic moment. (We also see a soldier without his helmet, which may have been against regulations and would set a bad example.):


Aug 21, 2016

Can a bin file be executed in a dos environment?

.bin files typically indicate an executable built for some flavor of Unix, so the short answer is No.

It can sometimes be made to work using the package Cygwin - a sort of bridge from DOS/Windows to Un*x.


Aug 21, 2016

Is it normal to never get messaged by a woman on okcupid?

I’ve been on OkCupid at various times over the last 8 or so years, and met some great women, and had a couple of relationships from it.

There is a self-reinforcing dynamic at work (for straight people anyway) that it’s important to be aware of : The man generally initiates contact. Old-fashioned? Sure. Sexist? Maybe. So is insisting on picking up the tab for a first date. But the man sure as hell better do it if he wants dating success.

And you really can’t blame women for this. Once this dynamic is under way, a woman has little reason to initiate contact. Most typically, she will get lots of messages - especially when she first joins the site. It’s all she can do just to keep up with them. Her best use of time is to select from this pool of guys (who already expressed an interest.) She’s really only going to go ‘casting’ out to other men if her inbox is full of duds.

This also underscores the reason you should make your first contact to her non-generic. Put some thought into it. Read her profile carefully and respond to it. Make an effort to stand out. (Guys who can write well have a distinct advantage here.)

(And ladies - note that you may want to try bucking the trend and initiate contact on such sites; the relative silence of other women work in your favor as you snatch up your dream-guy …)


Aug 22, 2016

How is UML different from pseudocode?

UML is much higher level, taking a purist Object Oriented view of things. If you walk away with a UML diagram, ideally you know have the high-level architecture of a project, but you’re no closer to anything that actually does anything. Or, depending on who you talk to, you may have completely wasted your time.

Developers: what do you *honestly* think about UML? • /r/software

Pseudocode is at a much, much lower level of abstraction. It’s just one step up from actual code - letting go of any language specifics and writing in some self-invented “pseudo-language” of the author’s ad hoc invention.

Psuedo code can be interpreted into most any programming language, almost line-per-line, by a programmer without much experience.

Both psuedo-code and UML are tools for people to communicate - not with the computer - but with each other. UML is for OOP-disciples to fuss over an architecture, psuedo-code is for any developer to fuss over an algorithm.

Psuedo-code is at such a low level of abstraction that it’s universally useful but not much more readable than actual code; UML is at such a high level that it’s far more readable but of dubious value (due to both its abstraction and OOP orthodoxy.)


Aug 26, 2016

I don’t have a physical body with any mass, but I am able to observe as I would with my own eyes. What do I see when I reach velocity of c?

At that speed, a second for you is an infinite amount of time for me. You would see the “end of time”.

If the universe is bound to collapse into a point mass again, you’d see the collapse and heating up. If, instead, it expands into “heat death” that’s what you’d see. Stars retreat and burn out and everything goes dark.


Aug 29, 2016

What is the relationship between a horizontal plane and a line segment that stands vertically on it?

Orthogonal.


Sep 1, 2016

What are the best strategies when you hit a brick wall in programming?

There’s really only three ways I’ve found to deal with this :

Stop. Drop the program, drop the problem, turn off the computer, go somewhere and do anything. Have it at fresh the next morning. In my experience, the you will solve the problem in 15 minutes. If your work environment cannot accomodate this, work on some other part of the program altogether.

Grab a buddy. Grab someone to help with your problem. Strangely - amazingly - the solution will come to you while you are explaining the problem to them, or answering a question they have. Otherwise they can often see the problem.

Reality check. Suppose you’re working on a text editor, which has numbered lists (like you’re reading right now.) And you’re trying to add numbered lists within numbered lists, and so on - recursively. And your indentation won’t come out right. Back way the hell up and ask, does anybody really want nested, numbered lists? If they do, is it worth a day of my time? Screw numbered lists. Even if I get it to work it complicates the code, confuses the user. No nested lists.


Sep 2, 2016

In 1928, were many Americans too poor to eat meat on a regular basis?

No - in 1928 America was enjoying the last year of a decade so prosperous that it was called, well - The Prosperity Decade, 1921-1928 (Overview)

The full quote by Hoover was a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” A euphemism for continued prosperity.


Sep 3, 2016

How do I ask Jessica Su to go on a date with me?

I must disagree with the other answers on this page, especially Jessica Su ‘s.

Take a class with her (she prefers to date students) but fail miserably (she is attracted to helplessness.) Wear exclusively corduroy and always sport a fez.

When the time feels right, publically Tweet your affections for her and back it up with a groupon for Icelandic food.


Sep 3, 2016

Do we think in words and numbers?

Never. I’ve been told by experts on That Sort of Thing that my case is somewhat unusual.

I think entirely in images (sort of. I really can’t be any more precise except to say “images” is close but not quite right.)

It takes me effort to compose words to speak, and to convert the words of others into my internal dictionary.

The act of listening can sometimes consume so much of my attention that I can’t perform a simple simultaneous task like making toast.


Sep 4, 2016

Why are you not preparing for the tiny possibility of a literal Hell?

My faith.

That, if God exists, S/he is benevolent and didn’t create me only to cast me into some eternal torture chamber.


Sep 5, 2016

What are some very creepy historical events? Not necessarily unexplained, but any events that have some kind of creepy connotation.

We all know that one afternoon - unusually warm and bright for late November in Dallas - America lost its youngest (elected) president to an assassin’s bullet.

And we’ve all heard the conspiracy theories that never come to rest. Theories spurred on by the added intrigue that the assassin was, himself, assassinated. Theories about a second or third gunman, a fourth shot - about the CIA and the Mafia and Castro and the KGB and Johnson.

And we’ve heard the official story, disappointing in its simplicity : A lone gunman got 3 shots off with a rifle and scope, got lucky and hit the president twice - the kill shot striking the president in the head.

Finally, we’ve seen the “Zapruder film” of the ‘kill shot’ to Kennedy’s head, throwing him back and to his left. We’ve wondered if that shot could have come from behind Kennedy and not in front of him.

Sure, the conspiracy theories are compelling - we want big explanations for big events. And a lot of the evidence seems weird. For example, Oswald had an inaccurate rifle.

But, really. Facts are stubborn things. It’s not that hard to tell the direction of a bullet-wound. It is a simple matter for any medical student to examine Kennedy’s head and determine whether the bullet came from behind - the book depository - or from the front - the grassy knoll. All you have to do is examine Kennedy’s brain.

Here’s the thing : The brain is lost. Gone. Nobody knows where it went.

Think about that. The single most important piece of evidence in the biggest crime of the century just disappeared, ensuring that neither present nor future generations could solve the crime.

Before you fit me for a tin-foil hat, this information isn’t from some dude’s blog. It’s from our own government. From the final report of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted in 1976–1978, accessible from the US National Archives - https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/

The president’s body was removed by coffin on live television to the White House immediately following the assassination. The brain and other autopsy-related materials were preserved and kept there.

April 26, 1965 - The brain and other material were transferred to the National Archives. The brain is specifically accounted for in the material manifest provided by Robert I. Bouck, the head of the Protective Research Division of the U.S. Secret Service (Volume 7, Section I, line 10)

October 31, 1966 - The Kennedy family officially gifted the brain and other material to the National Archives, so they could keep them forever. But the brain was found to be missing at this time. (Volume 7, Section I, line 16)

1976 - As part of the investigation, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted its own investigation into the disappearance of Kennedy’s brain, interviewing over 30 people. No explanation or even plausible suggestion has been offered to explain where the hell Kennedy’s brain went. (Volume 7, Section 3, line 98.)

Either it was somehow lost, secretly destroyed or it somewhere lies hidden, a vanished secret.


Sep 8, 2016

What is a proof of why there is no expression in n for the truncated sequence of π?

You won’t find a proof because such an expression exists. In a surprising result by a guy who just posted his work to a web site in the 90’s, an agorithm was provided that spits out the nth digit of pi (in base 16), without calculating the previous digits.

Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula


Sep 8, 2016

What is a beginner's guide to Python programming?

Web scraper!

Go to a favorite site of yours and extract out your favorite bits.

Python is exceptionally powerful at that sort of thing.


Sep 8, 2016

Did you know what Aleppo was before Gary Johnson's gaffe made news? Be honest!

I totally didn’t, and am generally considered a non-stupid type person.

#IAmGaryJohnson hashtag on Twitter


Sep 9, 2016

If a large, 10 km asteroid was about to hit the Earth in 6 months, could we reduce the impact by "cushioning" the impact site?

Oh hell no !

It’s not about cushion, it’s about energy. You speculate a 10 km wide asteroid. We have an example of an impact that size 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub impactor was about 10km wide when it struck the earth. It released the energy of a billion hiroshima-type atomic bombs. If every person on earth was holding a hiroshima type bomb and detonated it at the same time, we would only exceed that explosion by a factor of only 5.

65 million years ago, that explosion killed most anything on earth that wasn’t underground, underwater, or in some kind of shelter. (The big dinosaurs didn’t make it.) The entire atmosphere rose to 300 degrees for at least a couple of hours, most vegetation caught fire and most animals died. The CO2 from all those fires brought an ice age.

There’s just no way to cushion a billion atomic bombs.


Sep 9, 2016

My coworker wants to sexually engage with me, she said "bare with me", should I?

I can see no possible way in which this perfectly conceived plan could fail.


Sep 9, 2016

Can you identify something positive about the Trump campaign even if you would never vote for him?

When he's not putting his foot in his mouth, Trump can be quite charming; comfortable on camera - he can improvise for hours without a script.

Non Trump supporters only see the worst moments cherry-picked by the press; it is necessary to watch him for an hour to appreciate what a natural he is.


Sep 10, 2016

Why are programmers so anti-optimization? Why is optimizing so stigmatized in the Ruby and Node.JS community?

Every year CPU-time gets cheaper, while developer-time gets more expensive.

So conserve the more costly resource.


Sep 13, 2016

I am better at my job than the guy with more experience. But why does he get paid more, even though it's evident that I contribute more raised profit?

To add to Franklin Veaux ‘s answer,

As a company gets larger, “management” gets assigned to employees, not owners.

Management is hard. So people take shortcuts.

The best way to pay employees is also the hardest - estimate their total contribution to the value of the company. How they boost revenue now and in the future, prevent losses, and help others do the same.

This is really, really hard. Profits now - or 2 years from now? A small chance at big profits or a big chance at modest profits? How do you track their impact on the present, the future, on other people - how on earth can you track the disasters that never happened due to them?

The truth is, nobody can tell you exactly. It’s mostly intuitive. This is one of the huge advantages of a small company, which is not forced to formalize and mechanize this process.

But formalize and mechanize it they must, as they grow. They use proxies. Metrics. They count things and add them up - usually a weighted sum - and offer it up as as an almost pathetic stand-in for a real, holistic assessment.

The manager knows it’s mostly bullshit (s/he is also measured this way) but - shrugs - “What ya gonna do? Welcome to [X-big-company] …”

The bullshit-sum is called a “Key Performance Indicator” because, well, that sounds better than “bullshit sum.”

Back to your question - the oldest metric in the world is also the easiest - seniority. How many years? You can do the whole company with one Excel macro.

In coding, the bullshit sum - er, KPI - is likely to include other items like number of lines checked in, bugs closed and that sort thing. So now a bunch of old guys are writing reams of buggy code.

You can always bail and find a startup where you can count and not be counted.


Sep 14, 2016

When building an app, is it worth using Firebase as a backend, or will it become more expensive and unmanageable when (and if) you grow?

I would do the math on the “Blaze” package, the middle-tier which is fixed at $25/Mo

The likely constraint is likely to be the real-time database storage - a total of 2.5 GB, access of 20GB monthly.

Do the math for that on 100,000 and 1M users, and if you hit those limits keep in mind storage is another $5 per Gig monthly and access is $1/GB.

In general, I don’t think most apps would hit these limits even with lots of users.

More importantly - you said when building an app; if you’re creating an MVP you want every possible edge to get to the finish line quickly and avoid bugs. You shouldn’t be worried at all about scaling problems down the road. Build it cheap and build it fast. Use Firebase.

Good luck!


Sep 16, 2016

What is the most satisfying passive-aggressive thing you have ever done to a really mean or rude person?

Back in my early coder days, there came this New Guy. And the New Guy was about average technically but thought he knew everything better than everyone. He would argue endlessly, right or wrong, and would visibly get upset - face red and breathing labored - if the argument didn’t go his way.

I didn’t like New Guy. Nobody did.

One day, I’m sitting to the New Guy’s left. A friend of mine is on New Guy’s right. Call him Right-guy. I have an idea.

I am going to ask a really, really stupid technical question - over New Guy’s head, directed at Right Guy. I don’t really know where this is going, but feel drawn to some higher purpose I cannot yet quite grasp:

“Can you put a loop … inside another loop?” (For you non-coders, this is a thing called a ‘nested loop’. It’s one of the first things you learn. It’s roughly at the same level of learning about the comma in written English.)

I look at Right Guy. Right Guy looks back at me, a puzzled WTF? expression. I just look at him with a wide-eyed inquisitive smirk.

And by some miracle, some act of inspired fucking genius - Right Guy instantly realizes what I’m doing and plays along.

“No, that’s a syntax error.”

And I add, “Yea - because when the compiler is inside of both loops, it doesn’t know, like, which loop you’re inside of.”

New Guy starts objecting and turning red and we just sit calmly and say things like,
“Yea, even if the compiler allowed it, the behavior is undefined.” and “In any case it’s really bad coding style.”

New Guy blew a fuse. We never yielded.

Next day it was recursion.

New Guy didn’t last.


Sep 18, 2016

Would you like to visit a Massachusetts State Police barracks?

Not really. It's kind of like the Emergency Room. I'm glad it's there, but I don't really want to go there.


Sep 19, 2016

On non-digital movie cameras, why is there often a piece of tape stuck across the two film drums?

So you don’t accidentally open it, expose the film and lose your footage of Tom Cruise going bonkers!

I’m speculating here, but you show a Panavision Panflex camera, which appears to open by flipping two handles over the drums. So it makes sense to tape those over if you’re Seriously Filming. (The diagonal piece of tape would appear to serve the same purpose.)


Sep 20, 2016

Why aren't black people sent back to their homeland Africa respectfully?

There is no possible way to forcibly exile an ethnic group “respectfully”.


Sep 20, 2016

Does anyone can explain "int &operator+ (ostream &b, int & a);" this is the function, I just want to know why there is ampersand beside the operator?

This means that b and a are being passed by reference. (Pass By Reference)

The are not duplicated within the function; changes made within the function will remain upon return.


Sep 21, 2016

Why are there not more presidential candidates in the media and news currently?

Game Theory. Because Game theory.

Political parties have their beginnings in voting strategy. They arise naturally, as an unavoidable winning strategy. It starts with people with a shared viewpoint. That viewpoint may be a single issue - like abolishing slavery - or it might be more broad like “conservative.” These folks hold a an Election-before-the-Election, just among themselves, to decide which candidate they are going to back in the real election. The members of the party vote (more-or-less) together by agreement.

You can see how - if you are the first such political party - your guy is going to win because so many people are organized in lock-step behind one candidate. People who don’t like your party’s views will form their own party, vote together - and the race is on. Both parties will try to get larger than the other.

This system is pretty “stable” in the sense of Game theory. If a third party emerges, it will draw votes away from the party it is most similar too. It is said to be “splitting” that party’s vote. A painful example of this is Ralph Nader’s Green Party in 2000, which siphoned off Democratic votes leading to a Bush victory. So ‘splitting’ punishes the splitters.

So here we are, two huge parties, one of which will certainly win, and a zoo of “third party” candidates without a chance.

The study of this thing as a game can be really interesting. We can see, for instance, why so many states are “winner take all.” They are amplifying their vote by essentially forming their own party - a state-wide voting bloc.

We can see, also, some unexpected ways to play this game. You can create a third party of cretins you despise in order to split the vote of the opposing party. You can even sign up for the opposite party and work to get their weakest candidate put forward for the general election.

Come to think of it, that would explain alot.


Sep 23, 2016

What is the best brand to buy if I want to start smoking?

For every policy, in fact for every moral imperative, there is an exception.

“Though shalt not kill” - unless it’s Bin Laden.

“Tell the truth” — but not when asked if you are harboring Jews in the attic.

Quora’s avowed, never-excepted policy is that an answer must satisfy the question.

This is a rare exception to that rule, and I suggest there is only one ‘valid answer.’

I smoked for 30 years.

I don’t know how to start smoking. Nobody does. And there are no Jews in my attic.


Oct 1, 2016

What is a coder's worst nightmare?

A roomful of non technical people just brimming with *awesome* ideas …


Oct 5, 2016

How can I simplify the installation of software with dependencies on Linux?

One of many ways to do this :

Install The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud. - Ubuntu.

Then, from a command line, install Synaptic :

>sudo apt-get install synaptic

Finally, launch synaptic :

>synaptic

A window will popup, search for “mdk” and install. All dependencies will be handled for you.


Oct 6, 2016

How do you feel about some white people complaining about “Luke Cage” being ‘too black’?

Frustrated.

Not with race. With click-bait.

That article only references a few comments on twitter. That’s all it takes these days to fabricate a racial issue out of thin air and get people to click through,


Oct 9, 2016

Whenever I call out white-privilege, male-privilege, or any other kind of privilege, I get some visceral responses that are almost violent. Has anything similar happened to you? Why is calling out privilege offensive?

I’m going to tread carefully here, but I will tread as the SJW movement, grounded in “Critical Race Theory”, is in retreat on campuses across the country (and never really took hold elsewhere.)

The narrative of this movement is regarded as manipulative by many, as intended to create a sort of dictatorship of the oppressed. Previously, the race and sex of a person was never invoked to refute their arguments. That was really the whole point.

This ethic has recently changed with the ascent of “check your privilege”. The word privilege is sloppy and intentionally so. Privilege is optional. Privilege is unearned. Political philosophy doesn’t really concern itself with privilege.

What should concern the activist are rights. Rights are in-born and inviolable. Nobody ever suggests anyone “check your rights.”

The word privilege blurs the line between rights - to which you are entitled - and privilege - which you cannot demand.

If a cop shoots you because of your race, you have been deprived of the right to life and liberty.

If a band-aid isn’t available at the store the color of your skin, your rights are fully intact. The store owner’s right to sell whatever they can profit from is the only right at stake. The privilege of having the store owner stock your color is something you cannot expect, something you were never guaranteed in a free society. (You can, however, buy differently colored band-aids by the box-load from a supplier and offer them up for sale out of your home. Silly? Expensive? Pointless? There is much to behold in this realization.)

The civil rights activist defends the rights of others. The social justice warrior demands privilege for themselves - the first of which is the total silence of their detractors.


Oct 16, 2016

What was the German generals’ response to Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union? Did the generals actually think Germany could defeat the Soviets?

The generally prevailing opinion was that yes, Germany’s weapons and soldiers were vastly superior to that of the Soviets. It was widely thought that the army could advance quickly, secure the major cities and most importantly the oil in the caucasus.

At this point in the war - Germany had good reason to believe that numbers didn’t matter - that the Werrmacht was unstoppable and the Soviets would fall before the new year. Soldiers were often told they would celebrate Christmas in Moscow.

This wasn’t crazy thinking at this point. France had fallen in weeks, as had Poland. The Soviets gave the impression of total incompetence in the Winter War - Wikipedia, suffering catastrophic losses at the hands of tiny Finland. Stalin had purged the military of most of its experienced officers. And the Soviets had nothing like the industrial capacity of Germany, which was still almost entirely intact.

The USSR looked ripe for the taking. Culturally, the Germans were primed to underestimate this foe. Soviets were considered farming peasants; backward untermensch (subhumans.)

And the Germans weren’t caught off guard by the Russian Winter. They knew full well the offensive had to have achieved its basic aims before the first snows. They were not done in by the snow, so much as the mud.

You see, what was not supposed to happen, is that the Werrmacht would get bogged down on their way to Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad long before the snow fell. Firstly, the Red Army fought with the same fanaticism and discipline as the Germans (some, admittedly at gunpoint.) Secondly, the Germans were shocked to encounter a Soviet tank which was the best design in the world (by their own description) - the T34 T-34 - Wikipedia. Finally, there were freakishly strong rains in early October, which turned the roads into hundreds of miles of mud. Mud so deep that even horses sank into it.

Mud stops a mechanized army dead. Tanks and trucks can’t move. Supplies can’t be delivered - food, ammunition and fuel all run short. For most of October the Germans were stuck.

And taking heavy losses from those T34’s. It was actually a blessing when the first snows came, because the tanks and trucks could all start moving again. But by now, almost 800,000 Nazi soldiers had been lost, and 5 months had gone by in which the Red Army could prepare their counteroffensive.

When Winter finally froze the Nazis in their tracks, it was already too late. Short on supplies, demoralized, cold as hell - they could only watch as an endless wave of fresh Red Army troops advanced, well fed, well supplied, many on skis.

The Red Army rolled over them and didn’t stop until it got to Berlin. Had the Germans been able to move a bit more swiftly, had it not rained so hard, had they had a better tank than the T34, they may indeed have taken the Soviet Union handily.


Oct 17, 2016

How do we counteract the post-factual, conspiracy theory culture currently taking over America?

Realize you are part of it.

Virtually every ‘fact’ in your head that is of political import is false and provably so. Ideas don’t get into your head because they are true. They get there because they tend to get repeated by people who share your politics. It’s a sort of cognitive darwinism, where supportive ideas breed like crazy. The political causes are often quite worthy, so questioning these ideas can brand you a traitor - racist, bigot, etc.

Let’s play a game. We are going to take some ideas in your head. I’m not going to tell you to throw them out. I am just going to ask that you check them against credible sources without a political agenda. I’m not asking you to change your mind. Only to decide for yourself whether there is reasonable doubt about this “fact.”

OK, here we go. Notice how I can seemingly pluck these notions out of your head - that I “know” you “know” them. I’m not psychic - I’m just going by “viral persistence” - repeatability. These are the heartiest breeders. I’ll also offer a source to consider - one which is credible, of record, with no political axe to grind.

Women earn 78% on the dollar compared to men for the same work, same qualifications. Check the Wall Street journal : The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die

1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted or raped on campus. Check the Department of Justice: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf

African American men are at higher risk than whites of being shot while taken into custody. Consider this study from Harvard’s NBER : http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf

Man-made climate change poses an imminent danger to the planet, and the science is settled. Look up the writings and lectures of Richard Lindzen, perhaps the US’s foremost atmospheric scientist, recently retired from MIT. Richard Lindzen - Wikipedia

OK, that’s four. I’ll stop there. Trust me, I could do this all day. Is there a credible doubt?

Now, I know I will get flamed for this. That’s OK. But I also ask you remember the question is about counter-factual conspiracy theories.

If the Wall Street Journal, the Dept. of Justice, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Alfred P Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT are all lying … who’s the conspiracist now?

We all need to rigorously cross-examine information we hear - especially when it reinforces our most deeply held beliefs. Falsehoods may provide temporary gains but ultimately corrupt the integrity of the very causes we seek to uphold.

When you’re right you have no need of lies.


Oct 18, 2016

I have heard that people at MIT are so smart that the brightest of them can compute answers to mathematical problems faster than computers in some cases. How do they do it?

No, and this points out a popular misconception about “genius.” It is has a very loose basis in fact in that some geniuses can do “tricks” like complex computations or feats of memorization.

But most cannot. World-class talent isn’t a trick that can be shown off - like computing something faster or more accurately than a computer.

Genius is about jnvention. Think to 100 years ago. The genius is not the one who can add 100 5-digit numbers at a glance and write the answer.

The genius is one who, in 1916, realizes that a machine can do this and more importantly - that a machine should and indeed - a machine must. So s/he goes off and devises ways in which this might happen.

The genius doesn’t perform a task with greater precision or speed. The genius finds a better task.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Arthur Schopenhauer

So, no, you won’t find a genius doing anything extraordinarily well (though they often do.) You will find them doing something … else.


Oct 22, 2016

What are some ways to counter the perception that women are "distractions" in male-dominated startup culture?

It may help to fight fire with fire.

Since such prejudice is usually rooted in male insecurity, turn that insecurity against itself.

Say you’re a guy at a startup. And a male colleague implies that a woman might “not be a good fit” for a potential role.

This phrase might hit home: “What? You afraid of a girl!? Seriously bro?”


Oct 27, 2016

What can we learn from the fall of the Roman Empire?

Don’t split your empire.

Don’t drink lead.

Don’t poison your rivals.

Don’t get poisoned by your rivals.

Don’t piss off the Senate (or whatever parliamentary ruling body is around.)

Don’t put off renovating your cities till they burn down.

Be careful who you crucify - times change.

Do give people fresh water.

Do build roads.

Do keep people entertained.

Do learn from the Greeks.

Do stay alert for barbarians at the gates.


Nov 9, 2016

What makes a good SDK?

LOTS of sample code showing all sorts of applications, especially the simplest ones.

Good error reporting.

Active community to ask/answer questions.

Frequent updates - but never break backward compatibility.

Provide a Python version. Even though this is a slender market share (like Apple), it is favorite among “thought leaders” (like Apple.)


Nov 15, 2016

Why is the volume of a cone 13πr2h and not 12? I keep thinking it should be 12 and cannot grasp why it's 13. How can this be explained without calculus?

OK!

If it were 1/2, then two cones would add up to a cylinder of the same radius and height.

Grab a couple of cones. (plastic funnels are a buck at Autozone). Hold them next to each other, one of them upside-down.

You’ll be holding a cylinder of the right dimensions, bit with significant chunks missing.

That’s the extra third.


Nov 15, 2016

Is vaping a sin?

No, it’s an indirect dopamine re-uptake inhibitor. Nicotine increases the available dopamine in your brain. Dopamine provides focus, a sense of well-being and energy.

Many people with ADHD or depression have low dopamine. If you’ve noticed that vaping makes you feel and function better, maybe you need a dopamine boost.

A non addictive one, even. Talk to your doctor, not your priest, about your experience with vaping, your energy and mood. You may just be amazed at the results.

(Controlled medication is much better than self-administering nicotine.)

Note : the author is a damned hypocrite who wrote this whilst vaping. Still, though.


Nov 19, 2016

What is the answer for x(x1)=20?

This is one of those problems where it pays to be dumb.

Just pop a few values in for x.

2? No. 3? No. 4? 5? Oh! 5 works!

OK - now not so fast, now how about negative numbers?

Checking for a dumb-simple solution first can save time and prevent errors, which can be especially useful on time-constrained standardized tests.


Nov 22, 2016

I don't drink, so I am wondering if you give a drinker a cocktail made with vinegar instead of alcohol. Can they tell the difference?

Yes, and it happens all the time to wine. Various mishaps can occur in production that result in the grapes fermenting to vinegar rather than alcohol. The result is quite foul.

This is one of the reasons a waiter will open a bottle and pour a small amount for the man (traditionally) to sample. To ensure the lady isn’t poured a glass of salad dressing. (Or poison, for you Ancient Romans.)


Nov 24, 2016

Will the world survive the jewish plague?

Happy Thanksgiving, Serge!


Nov 25, 2016

Was there a major Mandela Effect 25 November 2016?

No - the Mandela effect is a known and temporary after-effect of injesting cannabis.


Nov 30, 2016

Atheists: Suppose there is a zero chance of being caught—why wouldn't you cheat or steal if the Abrahamic God can't judge you?

Who are you?

I ask not who you appear to be. Not how you act when people are watching.

Are you a thief?

Don’t answer - not to me. I really don’t care.

But answer yourself. To yourself - are you a thief?

Lots of people say “No.” A staggering number of people. Maybe a majority.

They don’t steal even when nobody’s looking - not even God.

Because they still see themselves. And they refuse to look upon a thief.


Dec 1, 2016

Is this a good HDR photo? Why or why not?

I thought it was awesome when it appeared in my feed, just the top 1/2 of it. When I clicked through and saw the ground and the chair and stuff - it struck me as way too many elements.

But this version I love -


Dec 3, 2016

What is the GRE score of Jessica Su?

Just because I cheated off her doesn’t mean I know Jessica Su ‘s score. Why the A2A ??

Anyway, her academic credentials indicate her GRE’s are through the roof.


Dec 5, 2016

How do I convince my anti-vaccine ex-wife that vaccinating our children is necessary?

Just show her this. She doesn’t even need to understand much English :


Dec 10, 2016

What are some little-known facts from World War II that fascinate you?

The Nazis had (almost) built the first stealth bomber. Jet-propelled, constructed of carbon-infused wood - it was nearly invisible to radar and could outrun any allied plane in the sky.

It only made it to the prototype phase (thankfully!) before Germany was defeated.


Dec 10, 2016

Why would a 15 year-old teen boy's joints hurt?

Probably nothing, but worth a trip to the doctor certainly, if only to screen out Juvenile Arthritis , which is very treatable.


Dec 12, 2016

Can anyone explain me the facility of Delta Charting Group out of Tucson Arizona?

Answers to this question are being astroturfed on a site called Jobboy. The Delta Charting Group is thus, in my view, highly unethical.


Dec 12, 2016

Why are there "proofs" that 1 + 1 = 2? Isn't that just the definition of the symbol "2"?

Mathematics is trying to get along with as few definitions and assumptions as possible.

So it’s desirable to ground arithmetic in Set Theory (like Principia Mathematica - Wikipedia) or in the notion of successor as in Peano axioms - Wikipedia.) Other mathematicians have sought other constructs.

Mathematicians aren’t seriously doubting that 1+1=2, rather they are trying to ground arithmetic in the simplest possible constructs.


Dec 13, 2016

How would you summarize the purpose of life in one sentence?

Go.


Dec 13, 2016

What is y+2 =y?

“No, it doesn’t.”


Dec 17, 2016

From a Darwinian perspective, is AIDS, nature's method to cull homosexuality?

It looks that way at first.

But think about it. Homosexuals breed rarely, and never with each other. So their genes are already disadvantaged in evolution.

But non-homosexual (straight and bi) people do breed like crazy. But some get AIDS and die before they do.

Damn. Turns out AIDS is nature’s method to cull out you.


Dec 20, 2016

Why should I use or not use UML?

UML is absolutely the most efficient and expressive way to do nothing whatsoever.


Dec 21, 2016

My boyfriend doesn't want me to go to a concert of my favorite group. What should I do?

This isn’t about music. This is about control.

And he demands way, way, way too much of it. This is selfish and more importantly dangerous. Soon it won’t be your music. It will be your phone contacts. Your friends. Where you go. What you wear. Who you are.

These control issues are almost always deep-rooted and unfixable.

Painful as it may be, you should go to that concert. A single woman.

Otherwise this gets worse.


Dec 21, 2016

Why are some people gay if the purpose of sexuality is reproduction?

I’ve also given this answer elsewhere on Quora, but this is such a perennial question that I guess it bears repeating.

(And I take it for granted that you are anthropomorphising evolution metaphorically; that evolution’s ‘purposes’ are really just inclinations to survive and breed.)

The researcher Andrea Camperio reports that gay men tend to have mothers and sisters which are more fertile and less prone to certain genetic disorders. (In fact, if you peek around your circle of friends you may notice that gay men tend to have lots of siblings.)

So if homosexuality is genetic, and Camperio is right that it creates fertile daughters and gay sons, then indeed there is evolutionary pressure for the ‘gay gene’ to prevail. (Subsequent generations would also be better dressed :) )


Dec 27, 2016

I heard from a friend that Rolls-Royce will sell you a car only if your grandfather had been very wealthy. How true is this?

Of course not, and beware the sales trick based on this very myth. I suppose we can call it the “Pretty Woman” gimmick.

Keep in mind that the salesperson is not wealthy. Rich folk don’t need to, you know, sell cars all day. So they don’t look down on non-wealthy people. If anything, they resent the rich.

In any case, sales-people of luxury items have been fleecing people for centuries by appealing to their insecurity. It works like this.

Customer walks into fancy place.

Customer appears unsure of themselves. You can’t tell if someone has money by looking at them - but you can easily surmise if they are uncertain. They either look around meekly and furtively, or they enter with exaggerated bravado. In either case, they are clearly not comfortable. Out of their element.

Pointedly ignore the customer. If the customer inquires about an item, whisper the high price tag and suggest a cheaper item or store. The point is to suggest they can’t afford it.

The customer quietly seethes and drops a king’s ransom just to show I am too rich!

Sucker. The customer will be the butt of jokes over drinks tonight, paid for by him (in addition to this month’s rent.)


Dec 28, 2016

Top paid developers at Valve produce 4000 lines of code daily (according to Gabe Newell), but what do you think is the norm in the industry?

Except for certain house-keeping tasks like porting or refactoring - very rare exceptions - producing 4,000 lines of code is a red flag of poor code quality. (So is 400, for that matter.)

This is no academic matter - “if you want fewer problems, write less code.” Every additional line of code is a potential bug, an item to be managed, and technical debt to be carried by the organization.

A good programmer writes less code.

A great programmer eliminates thousands of lines.


Dec 29, 2016

What happens when a smoker relapses after quitting for 2 weeks by smoking one pack of cigarettes over a weekend? Were those two weeks for "nothing"?

I use the following rule:

If you slip for two days, but then stop, 4 days later it gets wiped off the books. Your original quit date still stands. So stay quit and don’t sweat it!

(Larger point - whatever head game you need to invent - so long as you play it without a cigarette - is a winning game.)


Dec 29, 2016

If x+y=2 and x2+y2=2, what is the value of xy ? Could you break it down for me?

It’s 1, and here’s why. As I so often suggest in math problems, refuse to do any work!

Or at least much. Don’t solve for x or for y. Consider the expressions (x+y), (x^2+y^2) and (xy) and how they connect.

Realize that (x+y)^2 = x^2 + y^2 + 2xy (The FOIL rule for multiplying sums). This gives us the connection we need.

We are used to substituting values for single variables like ‘x’, but remember we can always substitute whole expressions. If we look at the identities we’re given, and substitute from left to right,

2^2 = 2 + 2 xy

The key to this exercise is we can treat complex expressions as variables and save lots of effort. (Or do it the agonizingly hard way, solve for x- and y-, probably making a mistake.)


Jan 4, 2017

Why is 2+2=4 and 2x2=4, 2^2=4 yet 3+3=6, but 3x3=9, 3^3=27? I mean why is 2 the only number with an equal sum and multiplication value?

Why does 2+2 = 2*2? (It also = 2^2.)

Because addition is done on two numbers. We say addition is a binary operator.


Jan 4, 2017

Which interchangeable name shall be on the Passport: the Kingdom of God or the Holy State, and why?

Happy New Year, Serge.


Jan 7, 2017

Why can I not multiply fractions in Python?

This comes up in lots of languages - you’re hitting integer division.

In lots of languages, when you do an operation on two integers, it is assumed that you want an integer result. So 9/5 gets rounded off to 1.

If you want a floating point answer, do this (9.0/5).

If you want an integer result, do the division last - like this ((9*num_base)/5)


Jan 7, 2017

Is hard work and above average intelligence sufficient to be good computer scientist/programmer?

Absolutely

Actually, the one trait I see common to the very best coders is intense interest.


Jan 8, 2017

How do I solve 4x2x2=0?

In your head.

Squint so you can’t see the exponents.

So 4 - 2 - 2 = 0.

Ah … x is 1.


Jan 8, 2017

How do I tell if somebody is intelligent?

Intelligent people … wander off.

Free from convention and conformity, immune to both praise and reproach, they are somewhere between Lost and Found.


Jan 11, 2017

I have an algorithm for lossless compression that could compress any file 1GB to 5MB or less, with the same speed as copying. What are some thoughts?

Thank Gawd!

Now we can pack 200 of those 5MB files together into 1GB, compress that to 5MB, and so on.

We can fit the whole internet into 5MB, which we can arrange into a Lego structure which anyone can reference.

Shut down the internet and call it a day.


Jan 12, 2017

Is the “If women ruled the world, there would be no wars” perception accurate?

Accurate but incomplete.

If women ruled the world, there would be no wars.

Just intense negotiations every 28 days.


Jan 15, 2017

Why is smoking e-cigarettes not allowed on airline flights?

Vapor looks exactly like smoke, which can cause a panic in a post 9–11 world (and in the wake of Shoe bomber: Tale of another failed terrorist attack .)


Jan 15, 2017

Many people say “partner” these days. Do you prefer the old, "boyfriend" and "girlfriend?"

I began using it back in 2004, when Massachusetts became the first (not sayin’, just sayin’) state to legalize gay marriage, and it became the common term for ‘spouse’ in a gay marriage.

‘Partner’ started to become synonymous with ‘gay spouse’. A very New English sense of propriety was offended that people were being linguistically cornered into divulging their sexual orientation. Straight people began to use ‘partner’ to defuse that connotation, and in a show of solidarity.


Jan 15, 2017

Can I access to a variable, with its pointer but without knowing its type?

You can print bytes starting at that address, but you don’t know how many bytes to read or what those bytes mean.

In statically typed languages like C and C++, ‘type’ is baked in at compile time. When the read occurs at run time, the read-er knows the type it is reading.

If, however, you happen to have a DEBUG version of the program, you can rig up a way to look up the type, variable name, etc.

But in general, no. I never liked this idea and hence don’t like statically-typed languages.


Jan 18, 2017

I'm too scared to study software science + maths because I'm female and people think I want to study it because of my boyfriend. What should I do?

Look up. Now left. Now right. Now down.

Nice site, huh? Quora’s made a significant dent in the universe - enough that you brought your question here.

It was designed by Quora’s first hire, Rebekah Cox . She headed design for a few years, and is still consults for them on the side.

I don’t know exactly what she’s doing now, except I can guarantee you this : It’s whatever the hell she wants to. Here she is.

When you’re done looking, turn off your computer. That reflection -

There you are.

What now?


Jan 18, 2017

Was Hitler planing to run for chancellor of Germany?

No, the Chancellor isn’t elected but rather appointed by the President, under the incredibly confusing and badly designed Weimar Constitution - Wikipedia.

Hitler planned to run for President, and did so in 1932, losing to Hindenberg. At the same time, the NASDAP was tirelessly campaigning to win seats in Parliament. When Hitler lost the election to Hindenberg, he went on to use the parliament seats to obstruct and harass Hindenberg. Finally Hindenberg appointed Hitler chancellor in the hopes of placating him.

Hitler was very clear all along, any route to power was progress to the ultimate goal of dismantling the government. One way or another, the 1932 election was intended to be the last election in Germany.


Jan 18, 2017

Why is OOP considered an advantage of C++ over C, although it is possible to create objects in C using structures and functions?

I remember being a convert to OOP, but writing in C because C++ was a work in progress (1990-ish.)

You’re right that you can go a long way toward OOP using just C. But you end up having to really strain the language; I remember the code comment became common - “Bad practice, but best I can do till Bjarne hurries up.”

For example, you’ve got to pass pointers to functions in order to get encapsulation. In order to get polymorphism, you’ve got to pass void-pointers and forcibly coerce types. You also lacked simple things like compile-time type-checking of function parameters.

The struggle wasn’t just aesthetic, it was dangerous. All this magic was like sword juggling - one slip and disaster.


Feb 3, 2017

I came up with a new rule: for each programming language one of my programmers learns they get a $2000 salary bonus. The idea is to accurately estimate how productive they will be then compensate them. Is this a good idea?

Your heart is in the right place, but the incentive is all wrong in my opinion.

Developers already make a decent amount of money, studies (and personal experience) indicate that slightly more money doesn’t motivate them. Money Is Not The Best Motivator

Here’s an alternative, and I think Quora-coders will back me up on this. Give them ten days of work-time to go prototype something in a new technology. Could be Python or Rust or whatever, any idea of their own creation. In the end they get to show it off.

Creative people are motivated, paradoxically - by total freedom to create.

Make the program completely voluntary. Everyone will probably opt-in. If someone doesn’t - and I don’t encourage any sort of retribution - that’s a strong signal that the dev is very unhappy for some reason or other. They may be in need of some extra care and attention.


Feb 3, 2017

How would you go about finding the value of a number within a larger number in Python?

It’s an odd thing to want to do, but the right n digits can be extracted like this :

def right(a,n) :
[tab] return a-(a/10**n)*10**n

I leave it as an exercise with cull out the digits from the n’th to the m’th position.


Feb 3, 2017

I know nothing about world war 1. What are some basic facts to help me understand what the war was about?

Apart from the specifics of who shot-whom, I think World War One may best be seen as a bomb inevitably set to go off in Western Culture.

The great Empires of Europe, taking a cue from Ancient Rome - had a very expansive sense of what … was theirs. These empires - British, French, Prussian, Russian, German, etc., were accustomed to a more-or-less constant state of war over territory and resources. (Their rulers also tended to be related. See, for instance, the Habsburg Dynasty)

These wars were, for the most part, relatively polite. Soldiers would assemble in orderly lines on battle-fields; spectators would even pack a picnic to watch. Marching on foot, you could literally stroll away from an advancing army.

This rather absurd status quo collided head-on with industrialized warfare. The rifle. The automobile. The machine gun. The telephone. The railroad.

Millions died over a squabble that never made any real sense. Its time had just come.


Feb 4, 2017

What is the best text editor to use?

Knowledge is a tricky thing.

What does it mean “to know”? Who is the one “knowing”? What is real? What we perceive? What we agree upon? Can knowledge exist outside the knower?

Deep questions. I cannot answer them. I cannot tell you what is reality. I do not know if anything at all really exists, or even if I, myself, have any real agency.

But for this one thing. This and this alone I can say absolutely :

Sublime is the absolute best editor for every programming language.

No better editor exists. No better can exist. Such a thing lies beyond mortal conception.

To doubt this central axiom is to descend directly into madness.


Feb 4, 2017

I am excited that I implemented my first tic-tac-toe game in Python, but my friend said it's nothing special and no employer would care for it. Why?

Like other answers here, I am going to agree that your friend is not being helpful.

Unlike other answers, I am going to vehemently disagree that a tic-tac-toe program is easy to write. [Edit 2/7/17 - Lots of other chimed in with encouraging words for the OP, so I should say “some other answers”.] That it’s a nice “first try.” I’ve done AI work for the Pentagon, for BBN Technologies - Wikipedia, I’ve written specialized programming languages - I got some chops.

It’s not a nice “first try.” It’s a very significant achievement. You have to use the right data structures. You have to make use of symmetry, take clever short-cuts - really think it through.

I challenge anyone who writes this off as a “nice first effort” to sit in a room and try to bang it out in a day.

The fact that you succeeded at this, so early, is an indication of real talent (and perserverance).

Your friend’s response is something endlessly encountered by developers at all stages. People scoff at work and dismiss it as “trivial.” Usually people with no comparable thing to show.

Talk is cheap and working code is not.

Screw your friend. Build on your success.

That tic-tac-toe code - look it over. You had to do some hacky stuff to make it work, huh? Maybe you want to see how you could have saved yourself some time (or code.) You could run it by a veteran Python coder and ask for tips. Feel free to send me a copy.

Not to rewrite it. To gear up for the next one.

Ever heard of Nim - Wikipedia ?

It’s rather similar to tic-tac-toe, but tailor made for coding (especially in Python.)

Have you looked into the notion of Recursive Descent? There is a direct mathematical trick to NIM, but if you skip that - recursive descent is a generalized approach that can be used for anything - even chess. Or language comprehension.

Your friend will undoubtedly scoff at a NIM game. But such a machine - Nimrod - was showcased at the Berlin Trade Fair in 1951. According to Alan Turing, the machine was so popular that people ignored the beer.

In Berlin.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Replica of Nimrod at Berlin’s Computer Museum, 2011

Feb 9, 2017

Is it extremely hard to be a good programmer? I am not sure how well structured and developed one’s brain should be, and I sense it is hard to be good at all aspects of programming.

I won’t say that I’m a really good programmer but … If you choose to I respect that decision :)

I would not say it is hard, rather - it is long. (Yes, I know, that’s what …) And it’s really about aesthetics more than anything else. The key to being a constantly improving programmer is that your tastes exceed your abilities.

You write some code today. It’s all hacky and gross, but it works.

You come back, clean it up. Generalize it. It’s still gross, but whatever. Better then it was.

A year from now, it’s laughable. You seriously hope nobody sees. Oh my God - here you are re-inventing the constructor! And here - your own garbage collector!

Then you learn a higher level language, and re-implement the thing from scratch. You don’t do any cut-and-pasting, for fear that old code will infect the new. This time you have a real language with manifest typing and garbage collection and safe pointers.

And … *sigh. It’s still so … you dunno. It’s OK, you guess.

And 5 years down the road you learn about functional programming and worry about mutability and multithreading. You see this old code of yours and realize there’s a single, elegant abstraction. Just begging to be lifted out of this mess.

And you write that - functional, elegant, short, extensible.

And really, that thing was 7 years in the making. And, it’s … well.

And you look at it 6 months later, and think “Hmm. I guess I can’t think of any way to make that less shitty. I guess I won’t touch it.”

That’s as good as it gets.


Feb 10, 2017

What should you do when you love and want to learn functional programming, but in your country, everything is soiled with object oriented paradigm?

Python.

Start writing useful things in Python because it is so “batteries included” - such a powerful collection of finely tuned libraries.

Say nothing - nothing - about functional programming.

Python does not enforce, but supports and strongly encourages Functional programming. Mary Rose Cook has put a nice introduction to the topic online for free here : A practical introduction to functional programming

If anyone catches you reading it, just mumble something about “Design Patterns” and close the browser quick.


Feb 10, 2017

Why is recursion better than iteration, when at the bottom level all things are converted to an iteration?

In this, as in all things, avoid dogma and fanaticism.

Recursion is not always preferable to iteration.

Objects are not always better than big dumb chunks of data.

Inheritance can be awful.

Design patterns can legitimize insanity.

There are times when - yes, I’ll say it - even a GO TO is the right thing.

Mic drop.


Feb 10, 2017

Why doesn't the US just mind its own business in the world?

Oh, that’s what we wanted. In 1939. America had been badly burned by the morass of the first World War. “America first” was the rallying cry and the name of a new political movement.

“If we desire peace, we need only stop asking for war. Nobody wishes to attack us, and nobody is in a position to do so.” — Charles Lindburgh chief spokesman of America First, 1940.

Polls consistently showed that at least 80% of Americans opposed intervention in World War II. Roosevelt promised voters he would keep us out of it. Even lending assistance to the Allies in the form of military supplies was done with great hesitance and legal maneuvering Lend-Lease Act - World War II - HISTORY.com

However well intended this may have been, it backfired quite badly. These two nations - which had now grown to sprawling empires while we kept to ourselves - declared war on the United States unprovoked and nearly simultaneously.

In January of 1942 it was not at all clear who would win this war of annihilation.

For better or worse, America never again seriously entertained the notion of isolationism.

“Minding our business” almost got us killed.


Feb 10, 2017

Why does lamdba calculas such an important subject in functional programming?

The Lambda calculus is a working definition of functional programming.

You can prove theorems about algorithms.

You can model a language on it, name it Lisp, and actually write code in it.

Rather than being a topic within functional programming, we might say that “functional programming” is just a way to talk about the lambda-calculus.


Feb 17, 2017

How can I fit a curve on random data points using Numpy/Scipy?

Behold! The power and glory of Scipy’s cubic spline!

This provides a ‘cubic splint’ least-squares fit to a segment-wise polynomial.

SciPy v0.18.1 Reference Guide


Feb 17, 2017

What's the difference between a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced programmer?

The beginner calls himself advanced.

The intermediate calls himself intermediate.

The advanced calls himself a beginner.


Feb 17, 2017

What's the point in adding "from __future__ import print_function" in __init__.py in python?

This ensures compatibility in Python versions 3.x and 2.x.

In 2.x, print “x” was allowed, 3.x accepts only print(“x”)

So the __future__ import hides this ugly breakage. (Why, python, why !?)


Feb 18, 2017

I am dual booting Ubuntu 16.04 and Window XP; I now want to uninstal Window XP. How do I do it?

As others have said, using GParted to remove the Windows partition and resize the Ubuntu partition is a good option.

Resizing the Ubuntu partition may be time-consuming though - you may want to simply reformat the Windows partition as file type ext4 and use it as extra space from your Ubuntu partition. This can also be done with GParted.

You can clean up your boot options using How to Install Grub Customizer 5.0.5 in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Seriously - assume you’re going to screw up and wipe the whole drive by mistake. Get all your critical work files backed up to USB and the cloud.


Feb 18, 2017

Why do poor people deserve welfare benefits?

They don’t.

But even the poorest of men can build a guillotine.


Feb 18, 2017

What was the single-character typo in Zerocoin that led the theft of $500,000 (2/17/2017)?

Looks like the smoking gun here, a patch checked in the same day.

Man, it looks like a single bit did all the damage. This is quite possibly a world record.

Anyone familiar with the code want to explain how this was exploited?


Feb 18, 2017

What's the best way to create demo-ready software without a functioning backend?

I agree with Ezra M Chang , but I think he buried the lede.

Backend As A Service (BaaS) + Client-side templating.

No server - no server code. JS/HTML and nothing else.


Feb 21, 2017

Which programmer do you hire: the one who programs a messy program in three hours or the other who does a well-structured program in twelve?

It depends on what the fast programmer wants to do next.

Hopefully S/he asks, “Is this a throw-away program, or something we want to keep around?”

If it’s not a one-off, they should want to refactor it. Which should take about half the time it took them to write it.

This is how a lot - and I mean a lot - of very good programmers work. The result of this two-pass approach is usually more considered and thought-out than the slow single-pass. Experience is a good teacher.

An important corollary emerges - Let them do it! Let them refactor it, damn you!

If this person is being micromanaged by a non-technical manager - that is, is employed in the year 2017 (*cough*) - the manager may want to throw new work at the developer. This is the origin of most of the world’s suffering.


Feb 24, 2017

What were the deciding factors why the Japanese Military decided to launch an assault on America during World War II? Was it necessary to do so?

“It is either glory or decline” — Japanese Prime Minister Tōjō

In 1941, the Empire of Japan was essentially controlled by its military. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, Emperor Hirohito was barely clinging to power, living in fear of assassination or coup.

And the military was on a major expansion spree. The goal was to achieve parity with the Western Empires. They had made enormous progress in that regard. Astounding, really :

An Empire to last for centuries. No longer dependent on foreign powers for critical raw materials like iron, oil, rubber, etc.

Only one threat remained. An enemy could blockade Japan, cutting off the sea-routes to its vast territories. Especially the oil fields in places like Borneo. The US had already halted oil exports to Japan. Japan was predicted to run out of oil within one year if they did not secure a new supply.

The Allies didn’t appear much of a direct threat. Germany had defeated Poland, France, had occupied and devastated half of the Soviet Union. The European powers now seemed locked into a stalemate.

Which left only America, whose population was rallied behind the banner “America First” and was deeply opposed to another “War of Empires.” Our only military presence was at Pearl Harbor. There was a huge fleet anchored there - but just anchored. In neat little rows. In shallow water.

So … “Glory or Decline?” The military powers decided to go for it - knock out the Pacific Fleet in a single massive blow. In many ways, it made a great deal of sense economically, politically, strategically.

In this, they made a couple of fatal miscalculations. Roosevelt understood that the US could not avoid this war much longer, and the sooner we got in the faster it would be over. And - more importantly - the US population - seemingly pacificst - were easily enraged and would commit to a total war of annihilation until the enemy either surrendered or was buried in smoldering rubble.


Feb 24, 2017

What is the best programming language to develop cross-platform mobile applications?

HTML5 + JQueryMobile + Client-Side Templating + Backend As A Service + Python/Flask as super-glue.

Minimal Templating on Steroids

Firebase | App success made simple


Mar 1, 2017

You need to write an algorithm which detects whether a number is Odd or Even using MOD?

Nope.

But you do.

Google “odd even modulus”.


Mar 2, 2017

In programming, why must we open a file before we can use it?

Lots of reasons really - but two primary ones emerge. One big and one small.

The file might not be there! You want to isolate that error handling in one place. That’s the small reason.

Screeeeeeeeech! That’s the sound of slamming breaks as your program exits the nano-second speed of silicon and enters the millisecond speed of the physical world, with spinning platters and robot arms and such. You know, the part that makes noise. This is a big deal. You don’t want it happening implicitly (on the first read). That’s the big reason.


Mar 7, 2017

Prior to 2000, World War Two was always abriviated as"WWII". Now I see it as "WW2" all the time. What gives?

One possibility is that roman numerals, since they re-use alphabetic characters, confuse search engines.

So WWII looks close to Wii - Wikipedia and so on …


Mar 8, 2017

Is Jessica Su an introvert?

Yes.

That’s what she tells everybody.


Mar 8, 2017

If Hitler had a cell phone, what would he text to the Nazi armies?

You mentioned you’re feeling depressed. If this doesn’t give you a chuckle, nothing will.

Credit - CollegeHumor

If Facebook existed during WWII.


Mar 13, 2017

Why do A, B, and C need to be squared in the Pythagorean theorem? Similarly, why is C squared in E=mc2? What is the purpose of squaring in math?

Pythagorean Theorem :

One of the many proofs of this theorem is the “Behold!” proof, apparently by Bhaskara of India , who just gave this picture with no comment as it suffices to point the reader to the proof.

The area of the big square is

A = (x+y) ^ 2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2.

A can also be found by summing the red inner square , r^2, with the four blue half-rectangles to give

A = r^2 + 2xy.

Setting both expressions for A equal to each other and cancelling 2xy gives

r^2 = x^2 + y^2.

So we can see why the “square” term emerges from the relation of the sides of a right triangle - it is when we draw squares from them that we discover their connection.

In planar geometry (flat, 2-dimensional) we see squares popping up everywhere as we find ever more informative arrangements of them.

Special relativity.

This is really out of reach for an introductory discussion - but long story short - Einstein is using the Pythagorean Theorem to connect time and space. Time is seen as a dimension at right angles to our space (like the right-angle in our triangle). This leads him to the Lorentz transformation - Wikipedia which is like Pythagoras on steroids, bristling with squares everywhere.


Mar 13, 2017

Should I tell my boss that I copy the code from Stack Overflow? I am relatively new to the job.

I must confess that some other answers here seem to lack a certain … realism.

Intellectual property - Nobody in the history of ever got sued for using a code snippet from SO or similar place. It just doesn’t happen despite the theoretical legal possibility. Nobody has ever been the target of legal action for using code from a public form. Ever.

Ever.

Your boss doesn’t care how you wrote it, unless they are technical. In which case they might look at your code.

Which brings me to,

Do the right thing. Credit the snippet with a link back to SO where you got it.

So that your colleagues (or future you) can go look it up again. (Maybe somebody improved on it since!) This way it’s a teaching tool and information resource.

There is no crime in re-using solutions. The crime is a failure to do so. (Just make sure you understand what you paste and unit-test the crap out of it.)


Mar 14, 2017

How do I respond to people's congratulation with remarks such as "it must have helped that you are a woman/minority"?

“Nah, the place is full of white guys just like y - … oh. Never mind.”


Mar 15, 2017

Who is going to the Top Writers New York Meetup on Thursday, June 1, 2017?

Imma be there.

In accordance with prophesy.


Mar 22, 2017

Why are there so many people now openly hostile toward “Social Justice Warriors”?

The “Social Justice” movement became prominent during the last few years. The older among us have seen many waves of youth culture come and go, from the 60’s anti-war activists to the 80’s materialist go-getters. We accept that the new crop plows under its predecessor, makes its unique stamp on the world, and finally passes into history making way for the next crop.

It’s healthy. It works. The flower children did end the war, help get southern blacks the vote, start real women’s liberation - all while landing on the moon. The 80’s yuppies did witness the rebirth of American confidence and economic power, and set the stage for a Cold War Victory. (I omit the seventies because … disco.)

So it comes and goes, swinging left and then right. The aspirations vary wildly, but one thing remains fairly reliable : Whether it’s building the internet or integrating the schools, each generation brings with it a passion, energy and skill that is perhaps a uniquely American trait.

But I must confess. People in my peer group - Left, Right and Center - are quite disappointed with this current crop of “Social Justice Warrior.” And it’s not because the crop is at any one particular point on the political spectrum. It’s deeper than that. It matters little what their philosophy is. They are shockingly bad at effecting change.

We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a new generation is politically still-born. It’s stunning. I’ll take a crack at expressing why.

Politically illiterate : Nobody seems to have cracked open a book which is old enough to drive. Students in the past read Marx, Freud, Mao, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, even Hitler. Today there is a total lack of this context. Students who just became “woke” actually believe their ideas were incepted in the 80’s in the form of Critical Race Theory. The provenance of this belief system to the Frankfurt School of Marxism in 1930’s Berlin is not interesting to them. They don’t know what the Frankfurt School is. They can’t describe Marxism. Would they be shocked to know that Critical Race Theory is an almost direct copy of Marxism, with ‘race’ substituted for ‘class’? I don’t know. Mind you - if you want to be a Marxist - go ahead. Many fine people have. The thing is … they knew they were Marxists. There is something almost pathetic about not knowing that.

Factious. : They can’t cooperate. The women resent the men. The black women resent the white women. The queer black women resent the straight ones. And so on. The result is that no-one need oppose them. They tear each other to shreds, instinctively.

The words. Perhaps the strangest thing is how they talk, or rather - fail to. There has emerged this sort of memetic pattern of speech which conveys nothing at all. They repeat each other’s soundbites, often at high volume : “Fascist corporatist transphobic misogynist!” We must explore diverse spaces through a post-colonial lense in order to uproot the patriarchy. This scripted repetition more closely resembles a religious cult than a political movement. It’s really fucking creepy.

Cooking the books. These folks are deliberately bad at math. Every economist knows the wage gap is a misreading of statistics. Every law enforcement agency knows that women aren’t at a 25% chance of being raped. Everyone in politics knows that black lives already matter - blacks are less likely than whites to be killed in a confrontation with police. Do not take my word for any of this. You can easily confirm this on your own. Which is my larger point - these things are easy to disprove, quickly and decisively, if we only care to try. This is no academic matter. People are marching to solve problems that don’t exist - leaving real problems neglected.

Go, tell it on the mountain! As in religion, the one practical objective seems to be - to spread the religion itself. To tell your story - sorry - lived experience. (Don’t ask me why ‘lived’ bears specifying.) Not me, because I’m white. And not you, because you’re not a black transgender diabetic. But somebody will come along - an intersection of 14 different axes of oppression, and they must tell their story. The rest of us will stand in silent penance for their suffering.

Tempest in a teapot : There’s no war in East Asia that interests these people. They’re not about to go into the deep south and defend anybody’s right to vote. Their world has collapsed to the campus around them - possibly the most privileged and safest environment they will ever know. They want to stop that speaker from coming. And a drunk guy yelled a racial slur last fall - demand the president resign! Activism used to begin on campuses - now it ventures no further.

They’re lying. About those personal sensitivities which garnered the nickname “snowflake.” The human race didn’t suddenly develop PTSD and extreme emotional fragility. We’ve dropped many an 18-year old into a war zone. Faking a weakness in order to demand special treatment earns you nothing but contempt.

Lost ground. Things have been steadily improving in America. High school kids can come out as gay - unheard of when I was a kid. We had a black president - and yes that does matter. And so on for other disadvantaged groups. While new legislation has been the starting point, the long road to cultural progress is really grounded in personal relationships. We’ve gotten to know each other. Our friends aren’t mentally categorized as straight, gay, black or white. It is in this personal connection that prejudice is defeated. It is one thing to see the humanity in all people; it is another to see that humanity first. We learn that, through relationships. By placing race/gender/etc into the foreground, the SJW’s reverse this work, obscuring our essential humanity from each other.

I don’t know how to end this, because I don’t know how it will end. I expect this barren crop will dry up and blow away, a fruitless and futile experience like the Dust Bowl.

I eagerly await the next crop.


Mar 24, 2017

Why are permissioned blockchains considered easier to scale?

In the same way that we can get to the Moon much, much more efficiently if we go to New Jersey instead.

A ‘permissioned blockchain’ is a marketing scam being foisted upon the financial sector. Finance sees the threat bitcoin poses - it’s faster and cheaper among other benefits. But these benefits don’t arise from some technology bits that can be extracted and grafted onto the existing financial structures.

The bank’s problem was never a lack of technology. It was a lack of competition. They were slow and expensive simply because they could get away with being so. The technology for fast, cheap transactions has been lying around for decades.

Put simply : I can send a person in Japan a picture of my breakfast using a device already in my pocket. It costs nothing and takes seconds.

Obviously doing the same with $500 is no technical challenge.

But banks want to sell - and buy - the story that they have simply been waiting for the miracle of block-chain technology. Not the part that makes the bank itself absurdly unnecessary. Not that part. But other bits like “open ledger”, “ring signature” - let’s wrap those up and call it “permissioned block-chain”.

“Permissioned blockchain” is code for “Let’s get off our asses at long last and process transactions much faster and cheaper and pretend we couldn’t until now.”

They’ll succeed, of course, because they always had the capability to do this. And certainly it will scale more easily than a blockchain because it’s not a blockchain. New Jersey is closer.

But they’ll be late to the party - their own party. And they will still be encumbered by suspicion of fiat currencies (Why A Cyprus-Like Seizure Of Your Money Could Happen Here), the whims of government (especially China), and the dawning sense that they don’t actually … serve any purpose.

There is an old joke that diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggie” while looking for a big rock.

Permissioned blockchain is a nice doggie.

Bitcoin is a big rock.


Mar 24, 2017

I cheated on my boyfriend. When I confessed to him all he did was kiss my forehead then left. What does this mean?

It means goodbye.


Mar 25, 2017

A girl was going to college and a boy asked her name. The girl said: "20 years 6 months". What could the girl's name be?

“Buy me some booze and I’ll tell you.”


Mar 25, 2017

Were the Third Reich soldiers using amphetamins during long WWII battles?

Oh, yea. The Germans were high on “tank chocolate” containing amphetamine,

The Americans were high.

The Brits were high,

The Japanese were high,

And this guy was really, really, really high :

Hitler’s Secret Drug Problem -


Apr 5, 2017

Why do engineers use big, old, ugly computers, like huge 15-inch big bulky PCs with CD drives?

See this?

It’s big. Weighs about 40 pounds. All that space means there’s lots of room for new components, and it’s easy to access everything.

It’s old. About 10 years. It was being tossed out by a big office building in Maryland - probably a government place. I paid 25 bucks for it.

It’s ugly, alright. That thing on top is an extra power supply, feeding more juice to the gizzards.

But. Unlike a sleek, expensive, portable Mac Air, I can pop this thing open with a flick of my thumb - in fact, as shown - it is always open.

Without tools and in seconds I can remove its GPU, CPU, RAM - anything. With an array of different slots it supports any hardware you might come across.

It works. None of Window’s glitches, slowdowns or viruses - it clips along faster than a mid-high range laptop. Reponsive and reliable. The whole working OS fits into 15 GB, making it quick to backup. Which it does automatically.

A couple of extra boards (lower left) mine cryptocurrencies as a side gig.

It doesn’t look pretty. But it works beautifully.


Apr 7, 2017

Is there any pure object-oriented language?

Smalltalk is the Holy Grail of object-oriented languages, as it was developed specifically to exemplify and teach OOP.

A quick check of OOP purity is this - “Does it have primitive types that aren’t objects?” Like int, char, etc?

If so - like Java or C++ - then it’s not pure.

In Smalltalk, if you want to add 2 + 2, you send the ‘2’ object a “ + 2” message , it creates a “4” object and sends it back to you.

Which is either beautiful or insane, I never could decide.


Apr 11, 2017

Is it possible to delete your entire company with one line of bad code?

Sure - but that notion (and the attached article) misses the point.

The guy ran a standard UNIX command - I wouldn’t even call it a “line of code”. Just a shell command to wipe everything, “rm -rf *”. It’s the Unix equivalent of saying “Sauron”. It creeps out techies to even talk about.

But that was only the last thing he did. The real mistake was well before that. All his backup drives were “mounted under the same root”, that is - all wired up together so the same system could take them out. And he dropped untested code into an “automation script” - something that fired when he wasn’t around. Basically, he was begging for some disaster. With that setup, even a nasty virus could have done the same thing. That last “rm -rf” was merely the coup de grace.

To say that line of code destroyed his company is like saying JFK was killed by merely “driving through Dallas.” Logically correct but you’ve really lost the plot.


Apr 11, 2017

What would have happened if Germany had won WWII?

It would have been written in German, exactly once, and very, very carefully by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda .

It would be an epic tale of heroism arising from decadence and chaos, of the genius of Adolph Hitler (“Ruhe in Frieden !”) , of the sacrifice and ultimate triumph of the Master Race.

The book would be handsomely bound, and despite its age of 70+ years would bear not a single blemish, pen mark, or dog-eared page.

Naturally. Altering it in any way is a crime against The Reich punishable by a minimum of 20 years in a work-camp, or death by firing squad - depending on intent and record of loyalty to the State. As it should be.

Sieg Heil!


Apr 11, 2017

What are the biggest myths software engineers believe?

This is just an addition to John L. Miller ‘s answer, which is better and you should read first.

Slow is bad. No. Donald Knuth famously said “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Programmers should strive for clarity, testability, and provable correctness before performance. Almost always the code at hand has negligible performance impact.

Crashes are bad. Take out any assert statements from production code, try to wing it when things go wrong. No. In production this leads to intermittent and impossible-to-eliminate bugs. You want failures to be predictable, absolute and early. Reproducible.

Objects are good. Everything should be an object. No. Objects should have 3 essential qualities : State, behavior, and identity. Not everything meets these criteria, and the object notion just attaches meaningless extra machinery.

Design patterns are good. Sort-of-no. If a ‘pattern’ is indeed re-usable, it should be a made into a reusable class or framework (like Model-View-Controller.) Often-times, however, it’s a missing language feature (object factories or garbage collector), or just some loose idea on a whiteboard. A good design pattern should already be baked in to your work environment, so never bears explicit mention as such. “Design pattern” is code for “something we forgot way back” or “we picked the wrong language to work in.”

Development time is predictable. The only type of work that is predictable is linear work - N sub-tasks which take X-time each. But if it is linear, then you are repeating the same thing - missing some abstraction. If it is based in experience, you haven’t properly abstracted previous work so that it can be re-purposed. Sure, you can have a “worst-case” estimate by assuming a total lack of abstraction and re-use, but the realistic estimate is “no fucking idea. If I could calculate it, I could eliminate it.”


Apr 12, 2017

Our small startup is recruiting and we immediately disqualify candidates who haven't even tried our product before the first interview. Is this good? Why would we consider someone who hadn’t even spent 2–3 minutes of their time to try our product?

“Interview”. From the Latin inter, meaning “between” or “reciprocally”. And “view” - to see.

So an interview means “to see each other.”

Why would you expect someone to try out an app you are about to demo with them, give the history behind, the roadmap ahead, the inspiration beneath ?

You were going to do that?

Weren’t you ?

Or do you prefer it one way ? That you see and not be seen?

You should clarify to candidates, this isn’t an interview. It’s an inspection.

Good luck with that.


Apr 13, 2017

Why do people reference the American Civil War when the say "the Civil War"? What about other civil wars, such as that of Spain and England?

For the same reason when you say “the sink is broken” you mean your sink, and not the one at the vegan Reykjavik tattoo parlor.


Apr 13, 2017

What are some red flags one can encounter as an interviewee for a software engineering position that scream "Do not work at this place!"?

Last week was a bad week.

Questions about the future are pure fiction.

“What kind of hours can I expect?”

“Oh we believe in a work-life balance here.”

Are business-decisions well informed technically? And vice-versa?

Oh I am a huge believer in communication - no cowboys here!”

What percentage of time is spent fire-fighting versus building?

That’s why we’ve brought you in! The sky is blue and bright!”

Don’t. Believe. A. Word. Not one word. Ask about last week.

“What time did developers go home last week?”

Oh - man, we did burn some midnight oil, can’t wait to get some new hands to the pumps.”

“Was some of that because sales people and tech people weren’t on the same page.”

Christ, yea - Joe got drunk on a flight to Vegas and promised the moon and the stars to a new client before end-of-quarter. Don’t worry though. We talked to Joe.”

“Was there any time for new product development last week?”

Oh hell no! But that was a bad week.”

That’s the job that’s there. That’s the job they are offering.

Monday’s just the start of another week.

It’s not dishonesty, just optimism combined with an effort to make their best impression. In addition to asking about last week, it helps to use this translator to interpret their happy-speak.

“Bill is tough, but fair.” Bill’s an asshole.

“We’re an agile shop.” We are not an agile shop. We have daily status updates to upper management which we call scrums. We further document our status daily in a tool called JIRA. There’s a person who does nothing but pester you for these updates called a Scrum Master. Your work will be micromanaged down to the minute.

“We’re looking for a self-starter.” There is no documentation.

“We are looking for a team player.” The guy who knew everything just quit.

“We’re thinking about switching over to Scala.” We lost the source code.


Apr 14, 2017

If people keep on smoking, is it possible that after many generations, they will evolve to be immune to the dangers of smoking?

Unfortunately, the effects of smoking tend to assert themselves after a couple of decades - when the children are already hatched and raised. (Excluding women who smoke during pregnancy, which is a double-wammy.)

So it’s a time-bomb that cheats Darwin by killing the smoker after they’ve passed on their genes. (Note that many other afflictions strike after middle age, evolution’s indifference to late middle-age can be seen here too.)

On the bright side, we also evolved big brains which - with age - often acquire the wisdom to stop smoking.


Apr 14, 2017

If Hitler had not attacked Russia, would he have been able to stand his ground in the west?

Probably, but only for six months or so.

Hitler had a date with terrible defeat in 1945, one way or another.


Apr 14, 2017

Can an algorithm be called optimised if the time it takes was reduced by 2-3 seconds from the original algorithm?

No.

It’s fully optimised when it’s no longer possible to reduce its run-time by 2 or 3 seconds.


Apr 15, 2017

How bad is race-mixing?

It makes no sense whatsoever.

Every person just ignores tradition and convention until you have this mongrel assortment of utensils : one guy uses a whisk, another a spoon, yet another with a martini shaker, and inevitably some clown shows up with a cement truck.

Oh. Sorry - that’s mix racing.


Apr 15, 2017

How bad is racism in Boston?

You’ll be fine - Boston has come a long way. There are still bastions of racism in the slums of Southie, Dorchester and Roxbury (sorry, guys) but people of any color tend to avoid those areas just because they are high in crime.

Boston itself, and over the river in Cambridge, sweeping west through Allston, Watertown, Somerville, Arlington, Newton and so on is essentially one huge college campus where you will hear every language imaginable and run into people from all over the earth. It’s also very LGBTQ-friendly.


Apr 16, 2017

Why did Altavista search engine lose ground so quickly to Google?

It’s been said in more detail by others on this page, but put simply -

Other engines looked inside the page for quality. They’d scan the text ever harder, looking for multiple occurrences of the search string, for pictures and multiple paragraphs and other measures of quality.

Scammers learned to game that quickly and turned search to crap. To intercept web searches in order to make a quick buck, all you had to do was put words on your page that matched popular searches. You’d be selling swedish penis enlargers, but put “orange doofus president” at the top of your page to catch all that Trump traffic.

The scammers got good, fast, and search engines became basically unusable. It was a mass extinction event for search engines, except one :

Google looked outside the page, to the web. A good page had lots of other pages linking to it. So long as the page had some mention of Trump, it made the short list. But it only made the cut with lots of link-backs.

Link-backs are really hard to fake (you have to go make a zillion sites.) Scammers couldn’t manage it.

So there was Google, all alone. That empty white page. (Did I mention google’s method was also much faster?) Relevant results. No Swedish penis enlargers.

Because that’s not my sort of thing, baby.


Apr 16, 2017

I want ideas for software products that can target niche market as a startup but have the potential to scale up. Any suggestions?

I’ve always wanted a Real Time Yelp.

In my town, at this venue, how is the band tonight? The crowd?

How bad is the wait at this restaurant?

How’s the surf at this beach?


Apr 16, 2017

If you could say one sentence to President Trump, what would you say?

“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”


Apr 17, 2017

Who is the most badass mathematician ever?

All the good ones are taken, so I’ll reserve my vote for Edward Witten - Wikipedia, the only person to win a Field’s Medal … unintentionally. His domain was physics, not math.

In the course of … and yes - I am pasting here - his work in topological quantum field theory and … also super-symmetry, Morse inequalities and … things like that - mathematicians held their noses, walked across campus to the Physics department to hand Witten a Fields Medal.


Apr 20, 2017

What would World War II have been like if we had Facebook and Twitter?

Credit : CollegeHumor.


Apr 22, 2017

Is the submarine from “Fast and Furious 8” realistic (crashing in and out of ice, immediately working after being undocked, etc.)?

Nah - not like that. Modern subs - especially the Seawolf, are designed to be able to surface in ice - a slow, stationary surfacing (takes about 10 minutes to break through 5 or 10 feet, no more). They incur a bit of damage doing so, and sure can’t move forward that way.

The most important use-case is the launching of missiles. They might also do it in an emergency to communicate or evacuate.

Haven’t seen the movie = looks cool anyway.


Apr 26, 2017

Is getting to know your clients by hanging out with them before doing business with them a smart way of screening out bad clients?

No - it’s a nice ice-breaker, but doesn’t yield valuable information. The way people work is so different than the way they socialize; they could be incredibly fun to be around but impossible to deal with professionally.

The only way I know to gauge a good client is to do a small job for them first, for a nominal fee.

Every car gleams in the show-room.


Apr 26, 2017

Should I make my own e-juice?

Sure, I make my own all the time!

Actually, I cheat a bit and use premixed ingedients.

If you’ll forgive me an endorsement - I’m not on their payroll but if they want to send me some freebies I won’t complain - E-Liquids by MyFreedomSmokes is a great online resource. Here’s how I do it. You start with this -

It’s the base of Propylene-Glycol/Vegetable-Glycerin and nicotine (you pick the levels.) That’s 7 bucks. Then, pick out any “flavor extract” you want for about 3 bucks. Maybe get a few bottles. Add about 10% flavoring to 90% base, shake well and vape on.


Apr 28, 2017

Why doesn't the US have hate speech laws?

There is an ethos that runs deep in our history and culture :

Coercing a man’s silence through force of arms is vastly more obscene than anything he might say.


Apr 29, 2017

If you have some app ideas that after research look like they will bring you more than 10 million active users, where you can find good investors?

Nobody, anywhere, will invest in just an idea - ever.


Apr 30, 2017

What's the coolest idea you've never shared?

You could totally commit any crime if you can find a pair of conjoined twins.

Convince one twin to hold the other at gunpoint and then they go rob a bank.

The courts can’t touch them because you can’t jail the innocent one.

I also can’t shake the idea that Satoshi didn’t invent Bitcoin, but he did invent a time machine and Bitcoin is an idea from 50 years in the future.


Apr 30, 2017

How did Internet Explorer lose the market to other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox?

I’ll give an answer which is perhaps oversimplified, but it’s from personal experience.

Suppose you’re an ambitious programmer. You want to be recognized for something, by lots of people. Not Zuckerburg or Gates famous, but just something cool you can be proud of.

Now suppose you’re surfing the net, and you notice a page doesn’t render right. Something’s wrong. If you use Firefox, it looks OK, but you don’t like Firefox.

If you’re using Explorer/Edge - all you can do is email Microsoft and complain.

But if it’s Chrome (or Safari), you can go look at their list of known bugs. Here’s one :

[Cocoa] Replaces uses of [get…() alloc] with alloc…Instance()

You can add your bug to the list. Then watch as programmers work on it.

More than this - if you know C++ you can grab webkit’s source code.

WebKit/webkit

You can fix the bug yourself. Yes, you. Mind you - the reviewers will put you through hell. Make you run tests. Question each line. Play what-if. If you survive that process, your “patch” will “land”.

And your source code will soon be running on 100’s of millions of devices.

That’s cool. That’s open source.

All that’s required in order to work on it is to prove that you can. It matters not where you went to school, if you went to school, what language you speak or where you live.

Here’s a tiny contribution of mine, which prevents a malicious web page from crashing the user’s machine.

Self-replicating code makes Safari hang and eventually crash

Chrome/Safari (before the webkit fork) are better than Explorer for the same reason Wikipedia is better than Encyclopaedia Britannica : A huge army of volunteers will defeat a small group of mercenaries.


May 2, 2017

What are some things that programmers and computer scientists know, but most people don't?

There is no Mozart.

Non-coders think that coding is hard, a skill that takes years to develop. Your success is determined by how high up the coding mountain you can climb.

If you’re kind of good, you can go work at a company. If you’re really good, you move up. If you’re super, super good you can start a company like Google, Facebook, Twitter and conquer the world.

The Mozarts of code, of which God made only a handful, bring forth a new type of music the world never forgets.

It’s wonderfully romantic but utterly false. Facebook, Google and such began as really shitty code. They were toy projects, technical child’s play for serious developers. The projects weren’t original, or even good by most measures.

What the founders had in common (along with a stunning amount of luck) is they were working on the right sort of problem, at the right time, and gathered their shitty programming skills into something that basically worked. Then they got incredibly lucky about 7 more times, took advantage of competitor’s missteps and changing circumstance, all the while making the right moves for managing growth.


May 4, 2017

You are an atheist and you die and then you are brought in front of God Almighty. Will you have something to say to him? If yes, what?

I still think I did pretty well for a guy dropped off on a weird planet with no instructions.


May 5, 2017

What are some useful secrets that you know, but most people do not?

People are walking around with the iron-clad conviction that today will mostly be like yesterday.

So do exactly the same things.

And that’s the only reason why.


May 25, 2017

What do I do if my girlfriend never accepts her mistakes?

I’m not about Red Flags, but this is one - not just in relationships but in work, play - any endeavor of life.

It is the Curse Of Perfection. There are people who cannot admit to even the slightest error or lapse in judgement. These people are toxic. Life involves a lot of, well, fuck-ups, and people who Must Be Perfect will assign blame for their own flaws elsewhere. They are highly critical of others .

This makes any sort of constructive discussion impossible, as they lecture you as to your flaws and throw a tantrum at the slightest mention of their own.

Almost everyone is capable of redemption : addicts, criminals, the temper-mental or brooding - these things can be fixed.

But run like hell from Perfect People.


May 26, 2017

Pretend I aim a gun at your chest and ask you, “Was Hitler a good man?” What would your response be?

“If there’s a God and you pull that trigger, you might just get to ask him yourself.”


Jun 11, 2017

What would medieval people think of the future if they saw the carnage of World War One?

“That … escalated quickly.”


Jun 12, 2017

Which is your favorite DIY e-juice?

I call it Deuterium or Heavy Water.

It tastes almost exactly like Coke.

I start with a cola flavor extract like this : LA - Cola Flavoring

Warning - this stuff must be diluted to about 0.1% else it shorts your coils.

To this I add a sweetener (honey flavor) and some fruit (honey melon.)


Jun 14, 2017

Is Quora too lowbrow for someone brilliant like me at the top of the IQ bell curve?

The question is like standing on the floor of the New York stock exchange, trying to impress people with a Canadian quarter.

You have no idea how especially silly you looked when some guy just flashed a billion dollars over your head with a hand gesture.


Jun 14, 2017

When would you choose to program in C over C++?

1990.


Jun 16, 2017

Why do programmers get confused with simple things?

So you are using some software, it does something wrong - you ask a developer, there is 5 minutes of “hmmm …” before they figure it out. And that strikes you as confusion.

I am reminded of an old joke, which may be illuminating.

A man approaches another man at a street corner.

“Can you tell me the way to the subway?”

“No, sorry - I don’t know where that is.”

“Oh. Does a bus stop nearby?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any taxis I can call?”

“Not sure.”

“Dammit - are you stupid or something !?”

“Maybe. But I’m not lost.”

The programmer who fixed your problem in 5 minutes may seem confused to you, but it only took 5 minutes and … you couldn’t fix it at all.


Jun 19, 2017

What is the significance of smart contracts in Ethereum having no independent arbitrator or escape clause?

An analogy to cryptocurrency may help here. How does cryptocurrency differ from paper money?

The primary feature of any currency is that you can’t counterfeit it. Otherwise the supply increases without bound (as people print off $100 bills) and the currency collapses. So no copying.

With paper money, we expend a lot of effort to enforce this. We put complex images on the paper. Give it a unique serial number. Use special ink and deploy authenticity gadgets for tellers to use.

Most importantly, when people do copy them we hunt them down and throw them in jail.

It is a system kept working by force of arms.

Cryptocurrencies solve the problem more directly. Counterfeiting BitCoin isn’t illegal - it’s technically impossible.

Would-be criminals hit a cryptographic wall infinitely higher than at any prison. Without consulting any human authority, we can see if a Bitcoin is valid, if it is unspent, if it is owned by you or not.

So we have confidence - and it’s a new kind of confidence. With paper money, the trust in our currency derives from trust in our government. With Bitcoin it’s grounded in cryptography.

Similarly for smart-contracts. A contract is just a more generalized sale. You and I meet, and you have a Thing, and we discuss the possibility that I hand you money and you hand me the Thing and we walk away.

It’s easy to see how this can get more complex : “Can I pay every week for 10 weeks to pay off the Thing?” “Can I just rent the Thing for a day?” “Can I bring it back when Thing 2.0 comes out for a partial refund?”

The contract expands in space and time beyond the in-face encounter. Future events and all sorts of logic come into play. Smart contracts express these things in code so that it’s perfectly precise. (Well, there are Undecidable Problems but that’s for another day.)

For example, I offer you the following deal : I will license a picture of myself, shirtless and oiled up, to use on your website’s splash-page. I guarantee you that my Adonis-like physique will bring your site’s Alexa ranking up 100 points in 6 months. I ask $50,000 in payment.

So, we put together the smart-contract. It contains the photo, code to check the Alexa ranking in 6 months, your payment deposit. We start up the contract.

Now it’s in motion, and can’t be stopped. As with traditional contracts, it’s important to think through different contingencies. For example, you put the picture up on your website and within 24 hours all your customers complain about the skinny white guy they’re forced to look at. You decide to take the picture down and want to back out of the contract, get your deposit back. You’re out of luck unless such a feature is written into the code. (You’re also out of luck if you leave that option out of a traditional contract.)

This is all done without courts, lawyers, without language - only code. The system is honest not by enforcement but by design.

This is where the power of Block-chain really shows. All sorts of concerns vanish. We no longer worry who the other party is, what country they are in, how honest they have been in the past. So long as we write our code carefully, we can do business all around the globe in full confidence.

This is genuinely unprecedented in human history.


Jun 20, 2017

How can I convince my parents to buy me a motorized mobility scooter?

I’ll assume you’re not trolling, and that you don’t have any sort of physical disability apart from being overweight.

A mobility scooter would eliminate 90% of your exercise. At 17 years old - presumably a student - you have the strength, youth and time to start getting in better shape.

Ask your parents for a pair of comfortable walking shoes and a gym membership. I think you’ll encounter a whole new attitude.

(If, on the other hand, you do suffer from a physical disability, most insurance policies will cover the cost of a scooter.)


Jun 20, 2017

What are the best (fast and scalable) languages for developing end-to-end machine learning systems besides Python?

The language R (programming language) - Wikipedia has really been taking off in machine learning lately. It’s approaching that tipping point where - you find an awesome library - and it’s written in R first and later ported to Python.

Originally a number-crunching language, R is :

Very fast, although interpreted it is comparable to C++.

Has built-in support for matrix arithmetic, the stuff of deep learning.

Not just “batteries included”, this is “solar panels included.” An unreal heap of functionality works out of the box. (Publication quality graphics? - Check.)

Born to multiprocess. R was built from the ground up with an eye toward parallel processing.

Here’s another question which hosts a beauty contest for deep learning with R :

What are the best packages for deep learning in R?


Jun 22, 2017

How can I write a JavaScript program to find all numbers n such that n and 2n have no common digits?

I won’t do your homework for you, but I’ll give you the juicy bits.

JavaScript Number toString() Method converts an integer to a string.

The data structure Set Object (JavaScript) only stores distinct elements. If you insert 5 into a Set twice, the second time does nothing.

An efficient, elegant and extensible solution is to scan both strings, character at a time. For the first string, store each digit in the Set. For the second, check the Set for each digit.


Jun 22, 2017

What is the best way to improve my skills in coding for browsers? I know intermediate JS but I find it hard to apply what I know even with jQuery.

I agree vehemently with Christopher Hacia - build something. Anything. Don’t worry about how to do every part of it, just start. When you can’t figure out how to do something, go search down the answer.

We remember what we need.

JQuery wraps up a lot of details for you, so definitely don’t wait till you “master” JavaScript before “graduating” to JQuery. Start using JQuery for everything you can.


Jun 23, 2017

Will my professor be impressed if I wrote an 87-page essay when the assignment was for 20 pages?

No.

You really need to watch the movie The Paper Chase (1973) in which a bombastic, pain-in-the-ass student writes a whole damn book instead of a paper.

I won’t spoil it for you, but it doesn’t go well. Fiction can contain greater truths, this is one of those cases.


Jun 24, 2017

How different would WWII have been if Nazi Germany didn’t have any racial prejudice and was only a war for political and economical power?

Great question,

The Nazi racial doctrine was largely of no military consequence, with - I think - one clear exception.

The Nazis badly underestimated the Soviets because Slavic peoples were considered subhuman Untermenschen whose superior numbers would succumb to the technology and discipline of the Master Race.

Now, they had some reason for confidence as the Soviet Union had begun heavy industrialization only about 10 years ago, had performed miserably against tiny Finland in the Winter War - Wikipedia, and had weak border defenses due to Stalin’s continued faith in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact - World War II - HISTORY.com

But had their racism not caused them to instinctively dismiss the Soviets as a serious foe, they may have questioned whether, as Hitler said, “One has only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse”. They may have sent more spies in (easy enough, given they were allies) to discover that - Stalin’s purges may have depleted the Red Army of experienced officers, but it scared the shit out of everyone else, who now took soldiering very seriously. That the Soviets were armed for a fight with some of the best weapons in the world - especially the T-34 - Wikipedia tank and the Katyusha rocket launcher - Wikipedia. That the Soviets had the industrial capacity to produce and replace armaments in overwhelming numbers.

Once it became clear that kicking in the Soviet door was a bad idea, Hitler commented to Guderian, “If I had known they had so many tanks, I would have thought twice before invading.”


Jun 30, 2017

Can I use string instead of char arrays to prevent buffer overflow in C++?

Yup!

The memory safety of <string> is it’s biggest benefit, IMO.


Jul 1, 2017

Is it okay to start learning C++ alongside JavaScript?

The only problem I see with this is that the syntax is so similar between JavaScript and C++ it may mess up your head as you’re learning. The same way that False friend - Wikipedias can trip you up when learning a foreign language.


Jul 9, 2017

Are there any services that can help me turn a startup idea into a prototype application?

None that I know of.

Which brings up perhaps a more important point.

A service that a delivers a basic prototype of an idea is a pretty good idea for a startup.


Jul 10, 2017

How do you politely decline a woman's invitation for a date?

“Thank you so much for your offer! I’m afraid, though, I have a prior commitment in 1952.”


Jul 10, 2017

Why should I use ArrayFire?

These are first impressions - I picked up ArrayFire a week ago and have been using it to do some deep learning stuff : My model has very strange, complex valued activation functions, weird topology and other features that aren’t well suited to the plug-and-play style of libraries like Keras (which is otherwise amazing.)

ArrayFire is more sharply focussed on doing vector and array computations very fast and very easily on a GPU/APU. In this, it really lives up to its name.

I had a bunch of code in Python for functions acting on vectors of data. At first, I gave no thought to speed until I got the algorithm right. (You know, write it first then write it fast.)

When it came time to optimize for speed, I knew the bottleneck was all the vector and matrix operations because I profiled the code. OK, I didn’t profile the code. But I should have. And so should you. Profile before optimizing, damn you! Damn me! Anyway, I got lucky and was right about the bottleneck.

I really did not want to write any OpenCl from within Python. My code was mostly mathematical, and although I’m fluent in C++ - as G-d as my witness I will not write any Python code that looks like this -

a_buf = cl.Buffer(ctx, mf.READ_ONLY | mf.COPY_HOST_PTR, hostbuf=a)dest_buf = cl.Buffer(ctx, mf.WRITE_ONLY, res.nbytes)
prg = cl.Program(ctx, """ __kernel void sq(__global const float *a,__global float*c) {
int gid = get_global_id(0);
c[gid] = a[gid] * a[gid];
}
""").build()
prg.sq(queue, a.shape, None, a_buf, dest_buf)
cl.enqueue_copy(queue, res, dest_buf)

That is some code you do not want to wake up next to.

ArrayFire-Python won’t mess up your code, rather - it cleans it up. Infix operators like ‘+’ and ‘*’ are extended to work on Vectors and Arrays, so we can add two vectors A,B directly by writing A+B. The job is automagically farmed out to your GPU.

So it took me a couple of hours to refactor my code - and I ended up with 30 % less code since I was relieved of having to dissect and reassemble arrays. The speed pay-off was instant, about 10x.

So if you want to speed up Array calculations with minimal fuss ArrayFire works miracles.

I shouldn’t leave the impression that it’s only for basic matrix operations, it has a very rich ‘batteries included’ library of functionality to do things like Fast Fourier Transforms. I haven’t played with any of those yet.

Once the big bang of 10x speedup was realized, I noticed my GPU was only being used at about 10% capacity. Where’s the rest?

I was running a bunch of matrix operations in sequence. They couldn’t be easily combined into one uber-matrix, but they also were independent of each other.

ArrayFire provides the ability to parallelize a loop for such cases. I tinkered with this a couple of days in Python but couldn’t get it to work. This sort of thing naturally comes with some gotcha’s, as we have to ensure threads are really independent, not juggling memory around unnecessarily, there are some constraints like no if-branches … but the documentation on this is very scarce and not very helpful.

I was, however, able to make progress switching over to C++. This may be due to C++’s explicit memory management, static typing, and perhaps just my own deeper familiarity with it.

In short, I found ArrayFire jumps out of the box with a huge bang, leaving a long but promising tail of future possibilities.

Critically - it’s Open Source and free to play with.

(Disclosure - I don’t work for these days and never did, I just (mostly) like their product.)


Jul 10, 2017

Can I buy a GPU for deep learning with a low budget of like $100?

I’ve done just that recently.

Hell - the whole damn machine cost $80. $40 for a used HP WX 4400.

It just has to host the GPU - this one has lots of slots and is easy to screw around with. For the GPU, a used Sapphire HD 6950 (2 GB) for $40 :

Cool heat pipes, huh? The Operating system is Ubuntu, which gets broad support from GPU libraries. The GPU software layer is OpenCL. Lately I have been using ArrayFire on top of OpenCL.

This creates a (super-) computer with 2 Teraflops of computing power.

This is by no means an industral deep-learning rig, but quite adequate for experimenting.


Jul 11, 2017

Did anyone from your high school become famous?

My high school English teacher spent his summers toiling away, allegedly writing the “great American novel.” Like so many English teachers, in so many schools, teaching paid the bills so he could write.

And write. And write. Every summer for eleven years straight. He was really trying to perfect the manuscript, honing each paragraph - sometimes aloud to the class. He even wrote my classmate into the book, barely changing her name.

Nobody else took it too seriously - any book which takes more than 5 years to write, well - isn’t likely to ever wrap up. But he seemed happy to teach all year and write all summer and hell - at this rate he might just retire before the book is done.

But he did finish it, after 11 years. The tale and characters were crafted with exquisite care, and it showed. He presented it to a publisher, who flipped out and advanced him $250,000 for a publishing deal. The book came out to glowing reviews, but sluggish sales. From the New York Times,

John Updike once observed that J. D. Salinger loves some of his characters "more than God loves them," which might also be said about Wally Lamb.

A few years later it caught the attention of Oprah, who annointed it Book of the Month. It shot to the top of NYT Best Seller’s list.

And that’s how an anonymous English teacher in a small town wrote She’s Come Undone.

He was not going to retire at Norwich Free Academy; over 11 long and hard summers he wrote himself into a new life, obsessing over each paragraph until he could improve it no further.

His main character is named Delores Price. I never got a chance to ask him, is the name an allusion to GB Shaw’s,

“What price, salvation?”

I guess you paid it, Mr. Lamb.


Jul 11, 2017

A coin is flipped four times and comes up heads each time. What is the probability the next coin flip will come up heads?

The standard answer is “50/50, because flips are independent.”

An experienced gambler will disagree - rightly - and say “slightly more than 50 % it will come up heads again.”

Because there is a very small chance that it is a two-headed coin, that it is weighted to favor coming up heads, the person is using sleight-of-hand or some other cheat.

Seeing four heads in a row is slight evidence in favor of rejecting the null hypothesis that the toss is fair.


Jul 12, 2017

How or where did you meet your spouse/partner?

Alexandra Pell promoted an answer of mine, and I messaged her my thanks. We got to talking and a couple of years later ended up together.

And that’s why Quora needs to bring back the promote feature.


Jul 13, 2017

It is revealed to you that God exists. Do you reject or accept him?

I generally avoid arguments with a Supreme Being, First Cause, or anything that can vaporize my solar system if it gets mad.


Jul 15, 2017

Is it possible everyone sees everyone differently?

My favorite answer to this is the one belonging to the school of philosophy called Logical positivism - Wikipedia, a perspective that Einstein insisted upon.

We must convert your question into an experiment. We may not be able to do the experiment with current technology, it’s enough that the experiment is conceivable.

For example, “Does space go on forever or is there some limit?” We need to restate it as an experiment : “If we build a spaceship that can go super, super fast and wait a really long time, at some point do we stop receding from our point of origin?”

Since we can describe the experiment, we have a meaningful question. We can’t do the experiment (yet), so we have a meaningful question with no answer (yet).

(Einstein, however, provides more clever experiments that support an answer of “space is bounded.”)

So to your question - “Do other people see color differently?” What experiment might you perform to verify this?

Take your time.

Can’t think of one? Me neither.

Therefore, in the minds of modern scientists and philosophers - the problem is not that you lack an answer. Rather, you don’t have a question.

It can’t be stated in terms of experiment so it has no meaning.


Jul 16, 2017

What are deep learning and machine learning, their differences, similarities, relationship, and a timeline of their invention history?

Eh - Google voraciously indexes Quora.

And your professor has access to a web browser.

You sure this is a good idea?


Jul 16, 2017

How did Hitler manage to take complete control of Germany when the country was, effectively, a modern democracy?

It starts with a story. A story broadcast by electronic means to the whole population.

A tale of a villainous subgroup among you which controls everything. In ways so subtle and pervasive that few people notice. A control which propagates through the entire culture - entertainment, news, art; Everything is subverted in service to a dark oppression.

Democracy is actually a tool the Oppressor uses against us. Free speech is an excuse to commit violence against your mind. Elections are a farce because the media manipulates the voters.

This is not a nation of equals; it is divided between the Guilty and the Victim. The Guilty owe the Victim (that’s us) a debt which can never be repaid.

The only solution is to topple the Oppressor by any means necessary. This starts by seeing the world through new eyes, that we may uncover the corrosive vermin in our midst, and rise up against them at long last.

Aw hell, what am I writing all this for?

It’s just outside your window. They’re calling it “Woke” this time.


Jul 16, 2017

If time is just the fourth dimension why is so inherently different from the other three dimensions?

As touched upon in this other answer,

Paul Mainwood's answer to Can one view time as an imaginary dimension? Did general relativity scrap this notion or was it just not elegant?

In special relativity this quantity is invariant,

t2+x2+y2+z2

The minus sign in front of time can be philosophically interpreted in all sorts of ways, but one thing is clear - the time dimension is distinct from the other three.


Jul 17, 2017

What other programming languages should I learn in addtion to Java?

Permit me to contradict myself.

I agree with other posters that there is no need to go racking up a third language in order to become more employable. Many companies don’t care at all what specific language you are proficient in - especially if you’re entry-level. They figure you’re going to spend 6 months learning stuff until you start
“doing more good than harm.” That’s ample time to come up to speed on their language of choice.

On the other hand, I think it’s a great idea to pick up a third language to broaden your perspective. Python and Java don’t give you a clear look at Functional Programming; a fundamental, powerful, and distinct way of programming.

The grand-daddy of functional languages is Lisp. That would be a fine choice. So would Scala.

You probably won’t ever use either in a job. But functional programming will give you insight into other languages the way that Latin gives you insight into other European languages.

It will also help clarify your thinking.


Jul 18, 2017

What are some science facts that people generally get wrong?

The speed of light limits how far in space a human can travel in their lifetime.

The reasoning goes, since light is the fastest anything can travel, for a human lifespan of 100 years, 100 light-years is as far as you can go. A lot of sci-fi authors write about “suspended animation” as a way to extend this range.

The fact is, you can travel a hundred light-years in 14 minutes. Or 2. There’s no fundamental limit to how quickly you can get there.

By your clock. Your clock begins to slow way down as you go faster. During your brief journey of minutes, a century has passed back on earth. But what you do you care? You got to the newly discovered planet of Beta Procion-6 in mere minutes.

Well, you might care when you come back to earth (while you’re having dinner.) Now 200 years have elapsed on earth. All your friends are dead. Sorry about that. But maybe you have money in an interest bearing account!

Wait - you might object - does this mean that time travel to the future is possible just by going really fast?

Yes. Time travel to the future has been understood since 1905, we just can’t go that fast yet.


Jul 19, 2017

What should you never say to a programmer?

“That is unacceptable” when told a piece of bad news.

I was just a few years out of school, working at BBN Technologies - Wikipedia, which was my first encounter with non-technical managers. I had just been put on a project that was already 3 months in, but somehow not a single line of code had been written and it was due in 2 weeks.

I reported, “This will not be ready in two weeks. It won’t be ready in 4. Beyond that I can’t tell you more.”

I was told, “that is unacceptable.” My response was unusually pithy for me, and pretty brash for a young age, but it became rather famous at BBN. I said quietly, and slowly,

“Oh. There is some confusion here …”

*dramatic pause

“… It is not subject to your acceptance.”


Jul 19, 2017

If a police officer was shooting at you in an unjustified manner, could you shoot back to defend yourself?

I don’t know about the other answers here.

Both natural law and man’s law uphold the principle : Deadly force is justified in self-defense if it is necessary.


Jul 23, 2017

How do I build customer retention in my vape shop?

While the other answers are quite professional, I come at this from a simpler perspective.

I drive past about 40 vapor shops in order to get to my favorite one. Your question nudged me to ask myself why - here’s what I came up with.

Price. You don’t have to have the best prices in town, you just can’t have the worst. The days of $20 for a 30 ml bottle are over with, a lot of shops don’t understand that. If your product is triple what I can get off the web, you’re toast.

Let ‘em try everything. This place puts most of their juices into pre-loaded tanks with rubber mouth pieces so you can sample everything. I know - that might not be legal where you are. It’s also illegal at my favorite store. They said screw it and do it anyway. I cannot taste products from the web.

Leave ’em alone to try it. My favorite place has a bar-like set up, a menu on the wall. You can try one thing after another. I suppose they don’t care at all if you try and walk out, but all the times I’ve “just stopped in “ I couldn’t resist a new flavor and bought it. The bar configuration is ideal because staff can leave the person alone, but they need only glance up to catch your attention.

No sales pressure. None. They vape. They’re in a vape store. They’re trying your stuff. if they hang out for an hour and buy nothing but leave delighted - they are going to tell their friends. This should probably have been #1.

Chat ’em up. Especially customers who come in alone, chat ’em up about their rigs of choice, changing laws - engage them. Does this contradict #3? Sure. You figure it out. But don’t hire non people-persons or stoned teenagers. And don’t let hire friends of each other, they will talk to themselves all day.

Forget about loyalty programs, coupons, and all that crap. Nobody cares, bruh.

Except - Let it be known, unofficially, that any customer giving you a shout-out on Yelp/Google gets 15% off their next purchase. Then throw in some extra juice.

Here’s what my fav place, which I won’t mention only because they skirt the law, looks like :


Jul 24, 2017

What exactly does the keyword new do in C++? During an interview, I said it instantiates a class and calls the constructor. Why is that wrong?

It sounds like the interviewer themselves had no idea what the new operator does. Like it was a “phone screen” (which is a terrible tool, employers!) conducted by a person reading from a script.

Other posters here are correct that your answer needs fleshing out a bit, but it was correct as far as it went. An interviewer who understands the question would have followed up something like this,

“What does new do?”

“Instantiates a class and calls the constructor!”

Always a class?”

“Hmm. Oh! Yes - arrays of things like characters and ints too.”

Yes. Must it be an array? Can you create just one?”

“If you really want, I don’t see that come up too often. But sure.”

“What’s the difference between something like an int and a Class?”

“An int has no constructor. It’s a built-in type.”

“Yes. ‘Primitive type’ but clearly you get it. OK - can you tell me a bit about what happens to memory when you call new? What a memory leak is?”

Your answer was fine, in my opinion, and should have led to the above discussion. It’s the interviewer who should be job hunting.


Jul 24, 2017

Does Donald Trump represent everything that made America great?

No?

No.

No!


Jul 25, 2017

How can I tell when the coil is bad on my Baby Beast tank?

You usually taste it. Like burnt metal or cotton.

Other times it may cause the tank to leak or gurgle like crazy.

Lastly there is the most obvious symptom : little or no vapor comes out.

Basically, if you can’t tell then it’s not gone bad.


Jul 25, 2017

You must interview 10 people for a C++ position. What 5 very difficult questions would you ask?

What 5 difficult questions would I ask?

None. I’d ask a single good question.

“How about we talk about languages? I see C++ as the ultimate low-level language, Python as the best high-level interpreted language, Smalltalk as the most OOP-ish, JavaScript the most wide-spread. Of course, I don’t expect you to know all these languages, but what do you think about interpreted versus compiled? Static and dynamic typing? Functional programming?

I’ll start - I worked for years in C++ and then took a job in Lisp. Wow, lemme tell ya …”

Start the bigger conversation, offer your own views, and see how they react. Start an argument over, say, garbage collection.

Screw the white board, take them on a stroll outside to walk and talk.

People who take to this conversation excitedly, disagree with you on points, correct you on others, mis-speak and allow themselves to be corrected - who can engage on a broad and informed discussion of their craft are always good developers.

Always.

A hypnotized monkey can write a red-black binary tree. And some very brilliant people cannot.

*Mic drop.


Jul 25, 2017

Should we stop fussing over which text editor to use and just concentrate on writing some code?

Oh.

Nobody told you. The editor wars are purely recreational. A bit of fun when people are taking a break from coding.

Like a snowball fight in the parking lot of an office building. It’s not serious.

Except for those imbeciles using VI !!!


Jul 26, 2017

How useful is functional programming (like OCaml) for scientific computing?

It is staggeringly, mind-bogglingly useful nowadays because of Massively Parallel Computing which is now available on a cheap GPU, accessible with OpenCL (AMD) and CUDA (NVidia).

Functional programming is about no side effects. Isolated streams of data which don’t change - new ones may be created but we don’t bash items in place.

This naturally cozies up to parallel processing - your data is naturally segmented and your 1000 different cores don’t waste time chatting to each other.


Jul 27, 2017

Why do people never give smaller parties a chance when the two that are always in power have done so many bad things?


Jul 27, 2017

How can I learn machine learning as a 17 years old?

The true Way to Knowledge [...] is not the timid and footling way of the Student, but the Divine Foolery of the Hacker -- THE LOGINATAK

Start by playing. Here’s a neural net you can experiment with in your browser.

Tensorflow — Neural Network Playground


Jul 28, 2017

Is it necessary for a programmer who hopes to focus on OS related coding to learn about Internet related coding?

Not at all, “Systems programming” is something you can safely dispense with for web development.

You should become fluent enough with basic shell commands to set up a server, but even here lots of cloud service providers give you working configurations right out of the box.

Linux is likely to be your best choice for OS.


Jul 28, 2017

What is one sentence that you never want to hear in your life?

“Defcon One.”


Jul 28, 2017

Can I go into a Catholic Church just to read the Bible?

I’m quite sure any church would welcome you.

I’m a bit biased because I was raised Episcopalian, but they make a point of welcoming anyone for pretty much any reason. These signs are especially common in New England.


Jul 29, 2017

Is it really fair for us leftists to be blamed for creating the conditions that made Trump’s presidency inevitable?

“[…] we had this assignment […] it was like a lamp. My light didn't go on; I got an F on it. Never got an F in my life. When I signed up, you know—for the course, I mean—I thought I was playing it real smart, you know. 'Cause I thought, "I'll take shop; it'll be such an easy way to maintain my grade point average."
“Why'd you think it'd be easy?”
“Have you seen some of the dopes that take shop?”
“I take shop. You must be a fuckin' idiot!”
“I'm a fuckin' idiot because I can't make a lamp?”
“No, you're a genius because you can't make a lamp”
—- The Breakfast Club, 1985

C’mon, fellow lefties. We lost to the weakest presidential candidate since the Civil War, maybe the weakest one ever. Have we become so juvenile, so self-indulgent, so deluded that can’t bring ourselves to own the loss?

The Democrats ran Bernie off the field in favor of the ever-mercurial Hillary. The snowflakes were too busy uprooting the patriarchy they forgot to show up at the polls. Our political message consisted of yelling “Sexist!” and “Racist!”. We began to attack core principles of free speech, engaged in racist anti-white fantasies, and spent most of our time attacking each other.

Are we idiots for losing to Trump?

No. We’re geniuses for losing to Trump.


Jul 29, 2017

What are the standards followed in present day wars between nations from 1950 to till date?

Your term paper is not going to be this easy to outsource.


Jul 30, 2017

What should I use to make a distributed web crawler in Python?

The grequests module works well for me,

https://pythonexample.com/code/grequests sample/


Jul 30, 2017

Does the ability to vary one's pace talking to people come naturally to most people, as it certainly wouldn't for me?

I have a great deal of trouble understanding people who speak too rapidly, or too long without a pause (it takes extra effort for me to process language, I think.)

I noticed something - it’s nearly universal. Eye contact is the key to moderating the pace. There are all sorts of subtle “speed up/slow down/pause/stop” cues that people exchange through visual cues. People I can easily understand keep making eye contact every couple of seconds.

People who speak too quickly or too much for me to understand avoid eye contact, even to the point of turning their face away so eye contact is impossible.

This happens to an extreme degree in those engaged in ‘pressured speech’; that constant, breathless stream of mangled verbiage that makes people painful to be around.


Jul 30, 2017

Why did the USA not stand by its European allies when they declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939?

The US public was deeply opposed to another European war. The first Great War came to be viewed as a massive bloodletting with no discernible cause nor positive outcome.

About 80% of American voters opposed intervention in WW II. FDR made this campaign promise in 1940,

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Now, FDR and others secretly realized that the US was going to get dragged in eventually. But there was just no way you could convince the American people of this.

This was the fundamental miscalculation on the part of Imperial Japan in bombing Pearl Harbor - and Hitler’s mistake (by his own rare admission) of declaring war against the US. FDR’s dilemma of private necessity versus public acceptance was resolved by the attack on our Navy.

America’s immediate response to Pearl Harbor was to attack Germany.


Jul 31, 2017

Do we have conclusive evidence that humans are the root cause of climate change?

No.

We know that it is imperative we transition off fossil fuels. The reasons for this are nuanced. Nuanced reasons do not motivate governments to make difficult changes. The reasons we have to get off fossil fuels are not based in certainties, but very, very dangerous unknowns.

How much fossil fuel remains in the Earth? Nobody knows, estimates vary by a factor of 10. Hubbert peak theory - Wikipedia warns that we may run out in 50 years, other theories argue that with additional hydrocarbon sources, we’ve still got a few centuries left. So civilization will either collapse amidst massive famine and war in 50 years, or it won’t. Given this lack of knowledge, there’s no question we need to slam the breaks on burning our fuel stores.

What are the short- and long-term consequences of adding industrial carbon to the atmosphere? We know accurately how much CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere, we can not calculate the climate impact from that. Nonlinear dynamics take over as some CO2 gets absorbed by water, ice, stimulates new plant and algae growth, other gases like methane and water vapor come into mix. So we’ve got complex models invoking feedback and ‘tipping points’ that are as sensitive to CO2 levels as they are to simplifying assumptions.

What does geological data tell us about CO2’s role in temperature? Here I am referring to the Ice Core data, which now goes back 800,000 years and records CO2 and temperature (well, it records proxies.) These show no causation - none - between CO2 levels and temperature. An ‘inconvenient truth’ emerges from digging into the raw data (which I have done). CO2 has not preceded temperature increase during the last 800,000 years. Rather, CO2 rises after temperature does. This is a major embarassment to the accepted doctrine, and debate is quick to break out and scientists are quick to offer theories as to why this might be just an anomaly. However, this is where science stops being science and becomes activism. When we go back to our experimental data, looking for explanations that keep our favorite theory intact, we’ve stopped listening to nature and started lecturing to it. Humanity has always lost that argument.

We know that ice ages recur. What causes that? Simple. Milankovitch cycles - Wikipedia - changes in the earth’s orbit and axis of rotation, predict ice ages with great accuracy and are the only factor ever demonstrated to do so.

So here I am, admittedly at an odd position. You can’t accuse me of being a shill for big oil, as I vehemently agree that carbon emissions must be drastically reduced with the utmost urgency.

I would just prefer we do it honestly. We know that CO2 disrupts the climate somehow. We don’t know its magnitude - at all - nor its duration, nor how it will interact with the historical driver of climate change - the Milankovitch cycles - Wikipedia.

And we do know for a fact that fossil fuels are a limited resource, and running out at our current level of dependence would (will) be disastrous.

We need not corrupt science - which must by definition never be ‘settled’ - to take bold steps. We can get to the same outcome through an honest and scientific admission of uncertainty rather than a counterfactual and manufactured consensus.


Jul 31, 2017

Why does C show a garbage value for uninitialized variables, instead of null as Java does?

As other answers point out, it’s for maximum efficiency.

Pro-tip : every C compiler I’ve ever come across will initialize pointers to NULL in debug mode.

So if your release build blows up but your debug build doesn’t, it’s not a quantum thing where the bug disappears through the act of observing it. It’s a reference to an uninitialized pointer.

David Vandevoorde offered the following correction in the comments, which blew my mind :

I think you may be misinterpreting your observations. Mainstream compilers don’t usually initialize pointers to null, even in debug mode. However, you are more likely to pick up non-zero value in optimized builds because the call frame are typically compacted, causing them to be more likely full of nonzero data.

Aug 1, 2017

Should vaping be encouraged as an alternative to smoking cessation?

The UK’s Royal College of Physicians has done so.

Smokers Urged to Switch to E-Cigarettes by British Medical Group


Aug 3, 2017

Why do some white people have trouble understanding white privilege?

The doctrine of “white privilege” isn’t defensible. Its more serious-minded advocates know that.

When you can’t defend a position, you have to resort to evasive tactics. One of these tactics is to conflate disagreement with misunderstanding.

To understand ‘white privilege’ is to agree with it. Think about that for a second. Other political issues are open to debate by reasonable, informed people. Take any issue : Gun control, nationalized health care, economic disparity, public education - now go larger to the big issues - communism versus capitalism, anarchy versus republic, etc.

You will find decades of debate, entire schools of thought falling into opposing camps.

But not “white privilege” ! It is the holy grail of political doctrines for which no person who understands it can disagree! Amazing!

Of course, this is just laughable. And it’s a well known diversionary tactic invoked as a last resort of people way over their head in political philosophy.

The notion of “white privilege” isn’t hard to understand, rather - it’s simply wrong. Let me give an example :

Black men in America tend to receive harsher prison sentences for the same crime than white men do. Needless to say, this is a very serious injustice that needs urgent redress.

The state it clearly - American judges are committing a racist action. That’s the problem. The solution is to find out which judges are doing it - pull their records - and either kick them off the bench or make them stop.

To cast the problem in the deliberately clouded and confused terms of “privilege” - white criminals enjoy short-sentence privilege and, in fact, all white people have the privilege of being able to commit crimes with minimal consequences.

Rather then attach the racist act to the judge, it has been attached to white criminals and, in fact, to all white people. But the problem is not the white criminal. It’s not white people. It’s the judge who gives unfair sentencing.

That judge may even be black. The color of his skin doesn’t matter. The fairness of his actions are what matters.

The language of “privilege” adds nothing and, in fact, derails what should be a simple discussion about finding racists and stopping them.


Aug 4, 2017

In simple English, how did Einstein's work impact human beings?

There really is no material benefit. If we delete all his theories from history, we would still have nuclear fission, space travel, and so forth. They would be a lot more mysterious, but we’d have them.

But it’s not that Einstein’s work is too small to see right now. Rather, it’s too enormous to see right now.

Einstein heralded a new age of enlightenment. He made a radical revolution to the way the humans think about the universe.

He didn’t just suggest, but proved - that our intuition about the world is often false. That our most basic understanding of things like space, time and matter are wrong, and we must open our minds up to possibilities like multiple dimensions, and fluid space-time.

This astonishing way of looking at the world, allowing our imaginations free reign to challenge the very clock on the wall or ruler in our hand, has set fire to science in a way that is new to the human experience.

In 10,000 years, I can’t tell you whether we’ll be moving through wormholes to other galaxies or powering entire planets from a roomful of hydrogen. But wherever we end up, it was Einstein who taught mankind that in order to know the universe, we have to release ourselves from false certainties rooted in the familiar.


Aug 5, 2017

Do you think that, in the future, computers will be smart enough to program other computers? If that happens, do you think it would mark the end of human programmers?

This has long been a compelling thought, but it turns out not to be meaningful.

The distinction between ‘code’ and ‘data’ has always been an artificial one existing mostly in the mind of humans to clarify their thinking.

Computers have big chunks of data attached to them. What it does with any given chunk is open to interpretation as ‘code’, ‘data’, or some murky hybrid.

On a more practical level, Lisp has been able to do this for decades. Machine-code programmers from the old days used to do it as a clever trick; slightly modify the next few instructions to pull a rabbit out of your hat.

To your question, “Will computers be smart enough to program other computers?” I hope I’ve convinced you that’s not a meaningful question, but perhaps we can replace it with : “Will the notion of ‘program’ disappear with the advent of AI?”

I think that’s the goal. To replace code with, say, language. (Hi Siri.)


Aug 5, 2017

What is the difference between sadness and depression (answers expected from psychiatrists and psychologists)?

One shortcut is you tend to feel depression immediately upon wakening, before you’ve even had your first thought.


Aug 5, 2017

What are some things that people who say they are not racist do that proves that they are racist?

It’s always been the same, from South Africa to UC Berkleley.

The racist claims that people of a certain race are essentially different : more guilty, more blind, less moral, more privileged, ignorant.

When confronted with the obvious racism of this, from South Africa to Berkeley, they always respond the same way :

It’s more complicated than that! You need to study up on …”

They want to continue being racist, but don’t like being called racist. So they do the only thing they can : redefine the word racist to exclude them.

Of course, it’s never been complicated, they fool nobody but themselves. and history judges them harshly.


Aug 6, 2017

If 2,000,000 social justice warriors found themselves in Nazi Germany, 1938, what would have happened?

They would stop repeating uncritically the same polemic blaming an ethnic minority for all their problems and demanding power for themselves, and start repeating uncritically the same polemic blaming an ethnic minority for all their problems and demanding power for themselves.


Aug 8, 2017

Is there any kind of a program that can only be written using object-oriented language and is impossible to do with structured languages?

All languages can do everything - see Turing Complete.


Aug 8, 2017

Was Google right or wrong in firing James Damore for his controversial diversity memo?

I’m a free speech absolutist but there is a profusion of messy thinking about this issue.

Personally, I would not have made Google’s decision. But Google was entirely within their rights to do so.

Take all the political crap out of this issue. The guy expressed disagreement about a business issue. Google has the right to decide that doesn’t work for them. Especially since his initial disagreement is no mere comment, but raises the spectre that he may not cooperate well in that environment.

Suppose, instead, Google had a split headquarters between Palo Alto and Boston. And this guy wrote that they need to shut down the Boston headquarters because Boston is nothing but pushy, noisy, drunken chowder-heads (which we happen to be, by the way.)

Now, it doesn’t matter whether the guy is right or not. Whether what he said was naughty or nice. It’s simply that, if Google has decided to keep Boston open, they have reason to believe he won’t work well with Boston.

Google is perfectly justified in firing this guy on operational grounds alone.


Aug 8, 2017

I want to say "we all agreed on something without discussing/organizing it". What's that word I'm looking for?

“Foregone conclusion.”


Aug 9, 2017

What specific assertions made in the Google memo are false?

Good question, I think everyone should take the time to read the whole thing if they want to publically comment on it. I found 90% of it to be perfectly well reasoned (and pretty standard Conservative) arguments, and 10% of of it straight up career suicide.

Nothing was demonstrably false per se. Rather, some things were both caustic and not credible. Specifically, the author throws out some assertions about evolved psychological and biological differences between the sexes.

Woman have more,

Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.

There’s more, but I’ll stop there. The author is claiming that women have essential differences that result in their aggregate under-performance.

Now, I have to be careful here. These ideas are not new and not entirely without some scientific support. That support, however, is shaky at best. Definitions are fuzzy, experiments are imperfect, and factors like culture versus biology are nearly impossible to separate.

So he’s saying a bunch of stuff - which might be true, but with incredible potential to do harm. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he clearly doesn’t have that.

What I find strange is that none of these “essentialist” claims advance his argument. I agree with him that affirmative action is bad, that inequality-of-outcome is not a case for prejudice, etc. But when I saw him making these unsupported and divisive claims, I chuckled and said, “Heh. Oh boy. Yea, you stepped in it.”

All he had to say was that far fewer women enter the STEM fields at the College level for whatever reason. Tilting Google’s hiring/promoting practices to try to counterbalance this is bad for business and doesn’t address the core issue of why fewer women choose STEM fields.

Something like that. But when he got into the whole “chicks don’t code like bro’s do” thing, he lost me - and I was on his side.


Aug 9, 2017

A guy asked me out today and I told him "no", but I wanted him to try harder. Why didn't he try again?

“We are what we pretend to be.

So we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut


Aug 9, 2017

My college professor called me a "white cis-gendered male" and that I was "born racist and privileged". What does that mean? Is she right?

“Criticism is the sincerest form of autobiography.” — Oscar Wilde

It means that she is white, cis-gendered, racist and privileged.


Aug 10, 2017

Should liberals be less condescending when trying to debate conservatives?

Definitely.

In order to debate constructively we must do ourselves what we ask of others :

To consider the radical possibility that we are wrong.


Aug 10, 2017

What do you think about Elon Musk's assumption that “we are living in a simulation”?

Occam’s Razor, as stated in its original form, is useful here,

“Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.”

Adding a mega computer behind the scenes of our reality introduces a lot of entities, and explains nothing.

It’s also untestable - so it’s not clear that it’s a meaningful assertion at all.


Aug 11, 2017

From reading Quora, am I right in assuming that there is little, or no give-and-take in American politics? Might shorter, more incisive and more frugal election campaigns help to clarify these issues?

There is no way we could do this any more frequently than 4 years.

This one time, we actually had a Civil War ! True story.


Aug 11, 2017

Why are the Social Justice Warriors losing?

They never set out to win.

The deeply misguided theory of ‘intersectionality’ wasn’t espoused by university professors in the interest of justice.

The goal, in retrospect, was profoundly shameful. It was careerism. Upper-middle class academics, who have never been to a ghetto and never intend to go, were trying to secure tenured-track positions for themselves.

Professors of gender studies, african studies, etc. faced the spectre of social progress. Within the last decade we had a black president and a female front-runner. Gay marriage was legalized in all 50 states. Asian-Americans have continued their upward trajectory. There was even a non trivial black Republican candidate. It’s harder to get your department expanded when society is improving.

During the last 10 years we also had an economic collapse unprecedented since the Great Depression. School budgets got tighter, and universities got more fickle about granting tenure, preferring instead a more contractual arrangement with adjunct professors who work semester to semester.

A professor of Gender studies wasn’t afraid of the Patriarchy. She was afraid of her competition. Other liberal professors.

The enemy wasn’t conservatives. It was white liberals. Or white feminists. Or black heterosexual feminists. Whatever group which lacks an axis of oppression that I just happen to possess.

In the end, the only thing really standing at this intersection was me, the obvious moral choice for the position of full professor.

It is one thing to oppose social change, to co-opt it for purely personal gain is just vile. Especially considering that academics are among the world’s most privileged, working a 20 hour week and afforded deference and respect.

Not everyone was as transparent as this professor - Black Professor Tells White Men to Quit Their Jobs: 'Probably Taking Up Room That Should Go to Someone Else', but I think there will be a lot of guilt to pass around when the SJW smoke clears.

Because the real problem is - and always was - and always known to be - poverty. A lot of poor white kids and black kids and latino kids need better childhoods and schools to secure the full blessings of freedom.

We have to change minds and change schools and change neighborhoods. This work cannot take place at some lonely, resentful intersection.


Aug 12, 2017

Space is said to curve. According to what reference system is it curved? Is there some underlying Cartesian coordinate system on which we can draw the curvature of space?

Curvature is kind of a misnomer - it leads to the nonsensical question of what space is curving in.

It may be clearer to describe space as misbehaving. Certain experiments - actually very simple in theory - start to come out wrong.

For example, take just about any law of planar geometry - say, that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. Let’s do that experiment.

And let’s use lasers to make a really big triangle, say 100 million miles. Try it over a region of empty space, far away from any big mass.

Yup - 180 degrees.

Now try it with a massive object somewhere inside the triangle. The Sun will do nicely.

Measure. Whoa. The answer is different. The sum is greater than 180 degrees. This is what is meant when we say space is “curved”. The greater the mass in the center, the greater the discrepancy - or ‘curvature’.

You might object that this particular experiment is just being misinterpreted, that the light from the lasers has mass or something so that it’s just being pulled into the sun, etc.

Fine - try to measure Pi then. Take a long flight in a perfect circle around the sun. Measure the circumference, divide by the radius. Whoa. Pi is off too.

There’s no way to weasel out of this. In the presence of mass, space is changing in a very real and measurable way. We label this discrepancy as curvature, and the mathematical description of it leans even further on that analogy.


Aug 12, 2017

Where do I find programmers with TensorFlow experience?

*Raises hand.


Aug 13, 2017

Is there a harm in learning JQuery without learning Vanilla JS?

Not really.

If you already know another programming language, you can skip straight to JQuery. Aside from its primary (initial) purpose of being a much improved way to access the DOM, JQuery does a lot of clean up on JS. It’s good to acquire the habit of using those features right away.

If this is your first programming language, you may want to give vanilla JS a try first, just to learn basic constructs like loops, branches, data structures, classes, and so on.

Move on to JQuery after you’ve written your first toy application but before you’ve written your first real application.


Aug 13, 2017

How often do I have to smoke with a JUUL to get 'addicted'? I've never used cigarettes and have no history of addiction. Will I be safe if I only smoke once a week?

It’s not clear if once a week is infrequent enough.

I hate to moralize outside the scope of your question, but the JUUL was designed to spike blood nicotine levels in the same way that cigarette smoking does - because of the nicotine salt solution it uses. I have one and I can certainly feel the ‘kick’ much more than a normal vape.

Which is great for nudging smokers onto the course of harm reduction.

But which is the worst imaginable thing for a non-smoker to do.

Don’t vape. If you must vape, don’t put nicotine in the solution. If you must use nicotine, use a low level of it in a non salt-based solution. If you must use a salt-based solution - stop and ask yourself why you are optimizing your chances of developing a health problem.


Aug 13, 2017

Why do doctors wear white and lawyers wear black clothes?

Doctors wear white to show blood.

Lawyers wear black to hide it.


Aug 14, 2017

Is censorship Quora's downfall?

In my years on Quora, there is hardly a single sacred cow I haven’t kicked straight in the udder. A sample of unpopular views that I have expressed :

Anthropogenic Global Warming is unsupported.

Third Wave feminism is toxic.

“Privilege” is not a concern of democracy.

The Wage Gap is BS.

The Holocaust happened but the numbers are murky and closer to 4 million or so; the percentage of victims gassed unknown.

The KKK has an absolute and inviolable right to assemble peacably anywhere in the country.

The use of tobacco in unprocessed form (snus) is almost harmless.

I could go on but you get the idea.

I have never - ever - been censored. I’ve never been moderated. I have never received any kind of suggestion that I remove, rewrite, or change anything in any way.

Ever.

What I have not done is attack individuals or groups. And it’s in my nature to argue passionately for my views, but not to let passion sink into hostility. I expect vehement opposition, and I respond respectfully or give them the last word.

My answer history is a clear demonstration that censorship on Quora isn’t just rare - it is absolutely non existent.

If Quora is censoring you, it has nothing to do with your content and everything to do with your courtesy.


Aug 14, 2017

How would I print the keys of all pairs of matching values in a Python dictionary?

[ke for ke in dct if dct[ke]==3]


Aug 15, 2017

Do I need to know discrete maths, algorithms and data structures to do programming as a beginner?

No, as a beginner, it’s best to pick these things in context, as you’re using them.

You can start with “Hello world.”

Most importantly - have fun.


Aug 15, 2017

Do geniuses like Einstein make stupid mistakes often? For example, space time curvature, time is relative to the speed of light, etc.

Those … are not mistakes. Is this your way of making a claim that space-time curvature is invalid and a light-based clock is inaccurate?


Aug 16, 2017

How would you describe Apple's advertisements?

Defiant.

Apple makes a point to defy accepted practice.

Here’s the 1984 ad where a woman tosses a hammer into Big Brother’s (IBM) face:

After spending a million bucks to film it, it was shown exactly once. It mentioned the Apple company only at the end, and hawked no product at all.

No marketer would have signed off on it. It made no sense. But we still talk about it.

The iPod,

Marketing : “Steve, we can barely see the product.”

“Don’t care.”

And then there’s their biggest ad, the simple Apple Logo on the back of their laptops -

Marketing : “We’re not on brand. It has to say Apple.”

“Shut up.”

Legal : “We need a trademark symbol there, otherwise we - “

“Fuck you.”

Sales : “That’s not really meaningful in overseas markets where people don’t eat apples …”

“You’re fired.”

Apple fearlessly defies convention and it shows in their advertising.


Aug 17, 2017

General Robert E. Lee is a true Confederate-American hero. Why do liberals hate him?

Your question is guilty of “Soap boxing” - it’s a statement veiled as a question.

But it gives me license to answer, so I’ll take it.

Lee is no Confederate hero. He was a rising star of the Union army before the Civil War broke out. He opposed secession, especially of his home state of Virginia. When Virginia broke off, Lee didn’t quit the Union army right away. Instead, he asked that he be allowed to sit out the war. Insisted he can’t follow orders to invade his home state.

He was rebuffed in this request, so he quit. And the rest is history, of course.

Lee was one hell of a good soldier. Brave, resourceful, disciplined, he had the kind of charisma that brought silence upon a room when he entered it.

But he was a career soldier. He would fight for whatever army offered the best prospect for personal glory.

Whatever word you choose to describe that, I doubt “heroic” is among them.


Aug 17, 2017

What is C++ used for?

You’re looking at it!

Every major web browser is written in C++ in pursuit of speed, the thing users care the most about.


Aug 17, 2017

What is the 'Free Speech Rally' for Boston all about (Aug 17, 2017)?

As a Libertarian and Boston native, I saw a lot of press announcing an upcoming “Alt-right” demonstration here in Boston, on the heels of the tragic events in Charlottesville last weekend.

I got hold of the event organizer, Garret Kirkland, on Facebook. He was good enough to give me some of his time to answer some direct questions.

I was surprised to learn that he is unwilling to share his platform with White supremacists (“They can have their right to free speech elsewhere”), that he is not personally a Trump supporter and is, in fact, a member of the Green Party.

Here’s the exchange we had on Wednesday evening on Facebook, Aug 16, 2017.

Chris Reiss : “Hi, I'm a libertarian and a Top Writer on the site Quora. I was wondering if I may ask you to express what it is you are advocating, so that I may post it to Quora”

Garret Kirkland : “sure. what's up? “
Kirkland : “We are advocating for Freedom of Speech for all people. We believe all speech ought to be protected, but we will NOT offer our platform to White Nationalists. (They have Free Speech, but they can Free Speech elsewhere.)”

What is your view of the way the media has portrayed your upcoming demonstration?

Kirkland : “They are outright lying to advance a political agenda.”

What is the truth you would rather see them advance ?

Kirkland : “That Antifa are a violent mob using terrorism to silence anyone "to the right of center". The same agenda that has concealed the violence against Trump supporters and conservatives for the past 2ish years.”

Are there specific instances that come to mind of Antifa violent tactics? Were they present in Charlottesville?

Kirkland : “Off-hand I would say the Battle of Berkeley and everything that has transpired before and after it, are specifically due to Antifa (what they are calling "alt left" now) violence.”
“They attack indiscriminately and without cause, using weapons and devices of all sorts from rocks to bombs.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbW46bWUmHw

Who are the actual targets of groups like Antifa?

Kirkland : “Trump supporters, republicans, and anyone who stands near them.”

I suppose it's safe to assume you feel the Media is giving Antifa a free pass and portraying their targets as Nazis and racists. Why do you believe they would do that?

Kirkland : “I have plenty of theories but I wouldn't want to speculate. I just know what I've been witnessing and it has been rampant violence against Trump supporters ever since the campaign season.”

I understand. What are your views on White Nationalism and related movements?

Kirkland : “We will not offer our platform for the advocacy of supremacist ideologies or the spread of hate speech.”

Your demonstration is in support of free speech. Are there particular perspectives you feel are under special attack? Things it is becoming unsafe to say?

Kirkland : “Yes, Conservatives and Republicans are specifically under attack, which are the target of the Antifa terrorists. It is becoming increasing unsafe to express support for the US President.
Full disclosure: […] I'm a Green voter. I'm not a Trump supporter.”

Do you have any advice for people on an individual level? What could be people do differently to help improve our democracy?

Kirkland : “Talk to people that you disagree with. Find where you can agree.”

Thanks so much for your time, Garrett.

Kirkland : “One ‘t’. Thank you !”

My profuse thanks again to Kirkland who took time away from a media onslaught to talk to me.


Aug 18, 2017

How can I make a sentiword dictionary in Python for tweet reviews?

The Sentiword module is provided as part of the Natural Language Toolkit (nltk).

A simple example looks like this - SentiWordNet Interface

from nltk.corpus import sentiwordnet as swn

happy = swn.senti_synsets('happy', 'a')

You can also hire me :)


Aug 19, 2017

I am currently coding a text-based game in Python. Since I am new to the language, can someone tell me how to make it possible for the player to save their progress?

User-12330700872010621745’s answer is great, but I would suggest, by way of first steps, to use a file to save state before moving on to databases.

Since you’re new, your code is probably not broken down into nice, clean objects. That’s OK. Just make yourself a data structure called State which contains all your global data, a function to write it to a file in text form and another file to read it back in.

And feel free to ask me any questions as well. Welcome to Python!


Aug 20, 2017

Have decades of extreme political correctness and the rise of Social Justice Warriors resulted in the lurch to the alt-right we are witnessing today?

Absolutely.

I had been a liberal my entire life - and I was born before the moon launch. For the first time, last week, I officially lowered the Liberal Flag and declared myself Libertarian.

I have advocated for gay marriage, racial integration, redistribution of income, universal healthcare, education and housing, neighborhood policing. I worked to get Obama elected twice. I have opposed interventional wars, economic imperialism, the global banking system - just about every liberal cause you can think of.

But the Left has changed, and I cannot identify with them in good conscience. They have given in to intellectual nihilism, hurling insults rather than reason. They have adopted the language and tactics of Communists, whereby there is no such thing as rational dissent : If you don’t agree, you don’t get it, because you haven’t read the book carefully enough.

Worst of all, they have co-opted the real struggles of minorities and women, fashioning them into a bizarre conspiracy theory so every bored suburban housewife, wealthy black ivy league student, and upper class immigrant business owner can claim the deference due to a victim.

Specifically, these are the claims, now de rigeur in the New Left, which I find unconscionable.

All white people are racist.

White males cannot understand what minorities are saying, so must silence themselves and receive understanding from them.

Rational discourse is a white, male, european construct.

To be “color-blind” in thought and action is racist.

“The best candidate should get the job” is racist.

Cultures belong to people, and to “appropriate culture” is racist.

Objections of this type are a pathology called “White Fragility” which requires training instead of reasoned reply.

Nope. I cannot find common cause with this platform.

I’m out.

You Liberals just created one more Libertarian.


Aug 21, 2017

Did many WWII German soldiers on the Eastern Front suffer from starvation?

The Nazi advance into the USSR took too long. To be fair to the Nazis (don’t ask me why we should be fair to Nazis!), the circumstances were hard to foresee.

The plan was for the invasion to take just a few months, and secure the major cities of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad. By Christmas, these cities were supposed to be occupied, with fuel pouring in from the Volga River and supply planes coming in from the West.

There were freakishly heavy rains in August and September though, and the army got stuck in the mud.

This gave the Soviets time to beef up the Red Army, who was off in Siberia training for a Winter counter-offensive.

Winter froze the mud and got the Nazis moving again, but they were not prepared for winter fighting, and were low on fuel, ammunition and food.

Having failed to gain a foothold in the major cities, and failed to secure fuel from the Volga, the army got bottled up in what the Germans termed “the Cauldrin” outside Stalingrad. Supplies attempting to come in came under heavy attack. The soldiers were under constant mortar fire and lacked ammunition to defend themselves. Hitler wouldn’t allow a retreat, so the solders mostly died of starvation and cold.


Aug 23, 2017

What are some valid criticisms of intersectional feminism?

“What do you want?”

Every political theory is really a demand.

What does a Conservative want? : Less government, more tradition.

Liberal : More progress, bigger goverment.

Marxist : Publically owned economy.

Feminist : Equal rights for women.

So exactly what is intersectional feminism demanding? “It recognizes that women exist among multiple axes of …” - No, shut up. I didn’t ask what you recognize, I asked what you want.

“Equal rights for women that is sensitive to the multiple - “

No, shut up. You have five words. What do you want?

Intersectional feminism can’t answer this question. There are many ways a political philosophy can fail to achieve its goal.

Not having one is the surest.


Aug 23, 2017

What would you hate the most about living in 1917?

I developed a pretty nasty panic disorder in my late 20’s.

It lasted at least 15 more years.

It completely resolved with the drug Klonopin, which I don’t need anymore.

In 1917, I probably would have been disabled by panic attacks.


Aug 23, 2017

Why do some people believe that hate speech is NOT a crime, when there is evidence that hate is viral, and leads to violence and murder? Why shouldn't it be legislated as it is in Canada, where their free speech is not in any way lesser?

The US has the strongest protection of free speech in the free world.

Hate speech is legal. You can even advocate violence! You can advocate all sorts of lawlessness! So long as you are saying it in the abstract, rather than inciting “imminent lawlessness.”

You may disagree with this. Canada does, as does the UK and many other countries. But before you do, I’d ask you to consider how and why this came about in the United States.

It wasn’t the ratification of the 1st amendment way back in 1791. It started there, but it really didn’t get worked out until the 1960’s. It was established in US Supreme Court case law. The 1960’s were a time of political unrest, and along with speech defaming entire ethnic groups some people were advocating for armed revolution.

The Supreme Court had to decide what to do with such cases. Only here’s the thing. It was civil rights activists in the deep south that needed protection. State police were accusing civil rights workers of inciting a ‘race war’ against white people. Of fomenting lawlessness and imposing collective guilt upon all white people.

The Supreme Court had before them the case, not of a civil rights worker, but of a KKK member. BRANDENBURG v. OHIO - FIRE They realized, however, if they decided against the KKK speaker, they would also be opening the door to the conviction of civil rights leaders.

The Court ruled that State governments must be disarmed in all such cases. They had to free the KKK guy in Ohio in order to free civil rights workers in the southern states.

Look, I get it. That neo-Nazi makes you really, really mad. And you want to throw something at him, you want a cop to bust him, you want something to happen to him. And you go looking for a line of reasoning like, “that speech will spread and then people will get crazy and then …” - you want to stretch things just far enough to get your desired result.

But here’s the thing. The Supreme Court doesn’t look at the issues of the day, they think in terms of decades and even centuries. That blunt instrument - the cop - you want to turn loose on that Nazi - can be turned on you some day.

“But wait!”, you cry. You don’t use hate speech. You’re fine, right?

Suppose, 15 years down the road, Christian (and Jewish) conservatives have their day at the polls and declare that a life begins at conception. Damn, you think, this is almost as bad as the Nazis. And you take to the streets to defend a woman’s right to choose, and to lock arms around Planned Parenthood.

And you are thrown in jail for advocating homicide against a protected minority, the unborn.

Your political adversaries stay up just as late at night as you do, and try just as hard to stretch out some justification just far enough to shut you down.

The Supreme Court is not trying to defend hate speech. It is trying to defend all of us from an abuse of state power so that each of us can decide, for ourselves, what hate is.


Aug 24, 2017

What films let the villain get away with their evil deeds?


Aug 24, 2017

Is it morally acceptable to punch a Neo-Nazi?

No.

But I’ll hold your beer while you do it.

*Shrugs.

Nobody’s perfect.


Aug 24, 2017

What is the remainder when 5051 is divided by 53?

Fermat’s Little Theorem is pretty cool. It comes in handy in unreasonably many circumstances, and makes you look a bit like a magician for the ability to solve impossible looking problems in your head.

Fermat's little theorem - Wikipedia

Any time you seek the remainder after dividing by a prime number, cue Mssr. Fermat :

I’ll leave the application of this to your problem as an exercise.


Aug 26, 2017

Why don't liberals respect peaceful Nazis?

It’s complicated.

On the one hand, the Nazis have respectable road-building and animal rights ethics.

it’s just they get a bit … murdery … towards entire races of people. It seems to me that you can build a road and pet a squirrel without murdering every one you see.


Aug 26, 2017

You just got elected President. What's your first tweet?

And now, for something completely different.


Aug 26, 2017

Do people who quit smoking and start vaping feel a difference with their health? Do they breathe easier than before?

My doctor did. He encouraged my switch to vaping after decades of smoking.

I used to have a slight asthmatic wheeze, which was audible to myself when I exhaled hard. That disappeared.

A year after my switch to vaping, the doctor broke out the stethoscope and listened in to a few deep breathes.

You’re totally clear.”


Aug 26, 2017

In a meeting, how does one deal with people who raise endless trivial objections to a course of action?

A bit of humor might do the trick. Rig up a projector and show this clip :


Aug 26, 2017

I currently write automation scripts to test web applications using VB.NET. How can I do this using Python and how do I get started?

Oh! You are in for a good time - Python really shines at this sort of thing.

First off, you’re going to want to play with the basic requests module. Just so you can load a web page.

Requests: HTTP for Humans

OK, now you can load a page, but you want to parse out the good bits. Behold the power of BeautifulSoup.

Beautiful Soup 4 Python

Now you know enough to scoop data from any site, no matter how it is rendered, with very little code (I’m talking dozens, not hundreds of lines.)

I know, I know - you want to do automation scripts, not just scraping. You need to interact, not just read stuff. Selenium enables you to interact with the DOM.

Selenium with Python

Sure, you could go straight to Selenium, but that is probably a little too “black boxy”. You’ll be so unfamiliar with the hidden workings of things that you’ll be unable to effectively diagnose and steer around problems as they come up.

A little extra time now, so you can do just basic requests (requests) and have an alternative (very powerful) parsing mechanism (beautifulsoup) at your command will save you lots of time down the road.


Aug 26, 2017

What is it about having pictures that makes Quora answers get more views?

I remember when Quora first introduced images, during its closed beta.

And I remember the first time I tried the feature, and the comment that ensued :

Including images in your answer was a ‘trick’ that writers quickly began to notice in others and use themselves.

The cynical view is that it’s eye-candy, a mindless appeal to baser instincts.

But I think there is more to it than that. Think of a magazine. Not that kind of magazine - think Scientific American.

Mixing images with text does a number of good things. It gives the reader’s eyes a rest, letting them focus out to the range of inches rather than pixels. It also gives them a chance to … stretch their minds … as they switch from verbal to image processing (what used to be incorrectly termed ‘left- and right-brained’.) We haven’t evolved to scan left-to-right, top-to-bottom for hours at a time.

And something more. Yes, a “picture’s worth a thousand words” - but even a thousand words doesn’t do it. In his book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung proposes that art is important because language is too restrictive a channel to completely convey our thoughts. He used the phrase, “We know more than we can tell.” Sometimes we have to show it.

I don’t think anybody uses a paint brush, but with billions of online images to choose from, we can consider the pictures we choose to be “found art objects”, and the selection process to be an artistic act.

So, some will consider the use of images to be superficial, banal, a certain sign of civilization’s collapse. To which I can only respond,


Aug 26, 2017

Who do Democrats think killed more people, Joe Arpaio or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

Please check Snopes before posting to Quora.


Aug 28, 2017

Are there any new theories around the possible causes of the Triassic Mass Extinction period?

In the last 20 years, a one-two punch theory has gained momentum.

Asteroid impact has been ruled out as a significant factor. Instead, the latest thinking suggests phase 1 occurred with the flood basalt eruption of the Siberian Traps - Wikipedia

This released CO2 into the atmosphere which increased atmospheric temperatures by 6 degrees.

The 6 degree rise triggered the next phase - the oceans released their methane stores. (Vast quantities of methane remain trapped in the oceans in a ‘frozen’ state.)

Methane is a much more effective greenhouse has than CO2, resulting in another 6 degree increase. A total of 12 degrees was enough to wipe out most life on earth.

Here’s a 2013 BBC documentary about it, The Day the Earth Nearly Died


Aug 29, 2017

What do you think about the masked anti-fascists with "No Hate" shields storming in on the right wing protest in Berkeley?

You will know them by their deeds.”

It doesn’t matter what you proclaim yourself to be, or what banner you display, if you choose the path of violence.

You’re just a criminal.


Aug 30, 2017

When was the time in the Earth's history when there was the maximum amount of life diversity?

Really great question.

I only have a guess (well, two of them). The first guess is just prior to the biggest mass extinction, at the end of the Permian-Triassic period, ~250 million years ago.

The second guess is today.


Aug 31, 2017

You meet a fox. It tells you that the swallows are conspiring against you. How do you respond?

“HOLY CRAP! A TALKING FOX!”


Sep 1, 2017

What is the coolest line in history?

“I will either be America’s greatest president or its last.” — Abraham Lincoln

“The problem with socialism is you run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher

“The British are prepared to fight to the last drop of Russian blood.” — Josef Stalin

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. “ — George Patton


Sep 1, 2017

Do you think people asking questions on Quora should provide their proof or point of view, instead of just randomly and conveniently asking 'Why is China such a piece of shit' without any elaboration?

Questions shouldn’t make a claim at all.

A lot of people try to camouflage a statement as a rhetorical question.

Such questions should be reported as Not seeking sincere answers. (Sorry, but “Seriously, I wanna know!” doesn’t cut it.)

At the very least add the topic ‘Questions that contain assumptions.’

You never have to provide justification for a question because a proper question asserts nothing to justify.


Sep 2, 2017

Are hurricanes like Katrina and Harvey a direct consequence of global warming?

We’ll never know.

Weather is distinct from climate. Weather describes events local in time and space, like a hurricane over a few states or a 3 year drought over a continent.

Climate is global and acts over centuries. Like an ice age, change in sea levels, doubling of oxygen in the atmosphere, that sort of thing.

Weather is always a crap shoot due to non-linear dynamics; it’s a chaotic system that - even if we could model it (we can’t), we could not calculate with to make specific predictions.

Even during an ice age, there isn’t a steady deep freeze. It becomes a period of intense instability, with alternating freezes and brief thaws.

We do know that ocean temperatures are increasing, and that makes hurricanes more likely. (The ‘purpose’ of hurricanes is to dissipate heat in the oceans, converting it to mechanical energy.) But that’s as close as you’ll get to a smoking gun.


Sep 5, 2017

What's the remainder of 9^99/125?

I’ve written elsewhere about how awesome Fermat's little theorem - Wikipedia is. Whenever you are asking about remainders (modulus), it’s worth a look. 125 shares no factors with 9^99, so the theorem applies. I’ll leave applying it to your problem as an exercise.


Sep 5, 2017

On the night of a full moon, mental hospitals have more staff working and generally, people go more insane. Could this be explained by the fact the moon controls water on the Earth and therefore, the amount of oxygen reaching the brain?

No - and this is a case of “reasoning by free association.”

Something like, “The moon affects the tides, and tides are made of water, a water molecule has 2 oxygen atoms, the brain uses oxygen. Eureka!”

The problem is you haven’t looked into … what actually happens. The tides do change - then what? Atmospheric oxygen is left unchanged, the oxygen atoms remain bonded to the water molecule. And this is just the first step in the causal chain that break down. It breaks at every stage.

Reasoning by free association is a popular way to be wrong. For example, “Vaccines contain Thimerosal. Thimerosal comes from mercury. Mercury causes brain damage. Eureka! Vaccines cause brain damage. Autism.”


Sep 5, 2017

Did you ever give a wrong answer on Quora?

Oh yea, lots of times. One example particularly comes to mind. Someone asked how do we know that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, What evidence suggests that dinosaurs were abruptly killed by an asteroid hitting the earth years ago?

It was something I had studied a bit, so I tried to write a brief expository article making the case. But I didn’t fact-check, I trusted my memory.

Readers came along and pointed out I had made a complete mess of things. These were among the errors :

The method of dating the pertinent artifacts was not carbon-dating, but radiological dating.

The crater is not 10 miles wide, but 100.

The isotope which marks the event in the fossil record is iridium, not tritium.

That’s all I can remember, but you can see in the comments people making various corrections. The good thing about Quora - and its culture - is people don’t make a big deal out of your mistakes so long as you’re open to correction.

I edited the article (more than once) to correct my goofs and - poof, now it’s correct and, if I say so myself, a pretty good answer.

Thanks to a little help from my friends.


Sep 7, 2017

Do most Americans have respect for Native American culture, as it is and as it was before the Europeans came, and why do you say so?

I think there is a tremendous sense of loss. The culture wasn’t written down, and smallpox hit the Americas like no disease has ever wiped out a population of humans. And Europeans did the rest.

What little we know of it is mysterious, unfamiliar . But the vast majority of it is lost forever. It’s as if the when the library of Alexandria burnt down it took Ancient Greece with it almost in its entirety.

It’s just gone.


Sep 7, 2017

What is the meaning behind the movie Being There (1979)?

This is reprinted with permission from Reflections on "Being There" by Stuart Fernie. I’ve included it here because I believe that Being There is a deeply philosophical film that is misunderstood by film critics, who are not trained in philosophy. This analysis by Stuart Fernie was the best I could find. Fernie has made an accompanying video for his analysis here :

I saw this film when it was first released and well remember being very taken with it as a whole, but especially the thought-provoking "twist" at the end. I was particularly struck by the deceptively gentle pace which reflected Chance's vision and approach to life, and served to underline what I took to be one of the central themes or "messages" of the film.

Although hardly a biting satire or wild comedy, "Being There" nevertheless contains very pertinent observations about life and society. It has been criticised by some for being too "arty" and for not being more overtly entertaining, but this is not a satire trying to take a rise out of political or social absurdities. At its core it is making serious points about life, the meaning we give it, and the society we are creating.

As gentle simpleton Chance is evicted from his life-long home (indeed his entire world, as he has never left the grounds), he is launched into a series of adventures propelled by a variety of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Of very limited intellectual ability, Chance's two areas of knowledge and interest are gardening and television.

A key element in the misunderstandings which advance the storyline is the way in which his interlocutors impose their own interpretation on Chance's utterances. This applies to virtually every conversation Chance has, and the audience is party to the joke as we are aware of the genuine situation and the true import of Chance's remarks (generally containing references to gardening, his only real area of competence). Thus, as various characters have conversations at cross purposes, we can see and understand how this happens, and feel superior to the wealthy and powerful characters as they impute significance to Chance's banal gardening "metaphors".

Jerzy Kosinski (author of the novel and script) appears to be mocking the way we need and seek wisdom and inspiration to the point where we impose metaphoric meaning and symbolism on what may be no more than "normal" conversation. Man, and by extension, society, may be getting "too big for his boots" in that he tries too hard to be clever to the point where, by over analysing and intellectualising, he actually creates problems which need not be there. It is in this context, which leads to anxiety and overreaction, that man seeks wisdom and knowledge from others. It is also in this context that Chance's gardening metaphors offer reassurance and comfort, and are seized upon by those in positions of responsibility in the film. As those in authority seek to control everything, and panic when they fail, Chance appears to offer hope in the form of calm confidence and a metaphoric return to nature.

Since we know that Chance's remarks are nothing more than a desperate attempt to engage in conversation using his only source of knowledge, we may interpret the film as saying that there is no meaning other than that which we choose to give it, and that society is shaped by the chance meeting of minds, of being in the right place at the right time, and by the interpretation of what is said. Chance has exercised considerable influence simply by being there at the right time - it is only as the result of a series of accidents and misinterpretations that he reached such a position of influence, and perhaps the same can be said for many such people and events which have influenced history.

This might have been a "straight" comedy, even a farce, if the authorities had ended up with egg on their faces, but they don't. In fact, Chance's words actually offer solutions, or at least others' interpretations of his words offer solutions and reassurance. It struck me at one point that Kosinski may be saying that what is important is not what is said, but the meaning taken from it by the interlocutor. Here Chance has managed to free people's minds from intellectual clogging and emotional involvement to allow them to see a solution. However, the ending of the film put an entirely different slant on things for me.

The final image of Chance walking on water suggests (in my opinion) that Chance is a messenger from God and that perhaps credence should be accorded to his utterings and credit given to the effect he has had. God moves in mysterious ways, so they say, and Chance has indeed had a beneficial effect on those whose lives he has touched (and who put their faith in him). He managed to put them in touch with themselves by cutting through complications and intellectual argument to find a simpler and more natural solution. Chance may be regarded not so much as a vessel of knowledge but as a vessel of approach and attitude. He encourages us to appreciate simpler things and nature, be more accepting, and not to seek to control.

In fact Chance may even be regarded as wise since he has no perception of the problems he helps to resolve. Problems, then, may be seen as largely of our own making.

It seems to me that a worthy point of reference is Voltaire's "Candide". At the end of that story the idealistic Candide has become thoroughly disillusioned with life and the various philosophies he has encountered. His solution is "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." (We must develop our garden). His friend Martin agrees and adds with even greater clarity, "Travaillons sans raisonner - c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable." (Let's work without thinking - that's the only way of making life bearable). Candide's solution is to return to nature and the simple life, unquestioning, undoubting - this is the way to happiness as opposed to his wordly wise adventures which led to unhappiness and cynicism.

It could be suggested that Chance has cultivated his garden, and through the gardening metaphor hopes to help others cultivate their (simpler) garden of life.

Peter emailed me with a few of his illuminating thoughts:

• “Heidegger’s term “dasein” can be translated as “being-there”, an existence not contained to the mind or even to the body but to one’s frame of experience across time and space; essentially an active existence with reason, senses and context.

• Chance is the name of the main character. The concept of chance is anti-reason and therefore contrary to the tradition of Western philosophy from Plato onwards, especially since Descartes. Existentialism denies the supremacy of reason and acknowledges the place of irrationalism, the unconscious and the unknown. Truth is a greater thing than an intellectual understanding.

• The colourful, episodic period of Chance’s life begins when he is confronted by death and the void without sustenance from the “old man” Jennings. Later the death of Ben Rand brings him up against a greater loss but he has made progress without diluting his values and moves on to a situation with even greater potential for fulfilment. However, any meaning he makes of his existence is in unthinking response or coincidental to his meetings with death. Existentialism requires man to remain aware of death and the reality of nothingness in order to create a life of meaning.

• Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” and Chance’s benefactor and protector dies at the start of the movie, thus initiating a journey through a more complex and dangerous world. However Chance does not take control of his own destiny, he benefits from the attention of others – “the kindness of strangers” as Tennessee Williams would have it – and again he finds himself under the protection of a god-figure in Rand. Rand also dies without response from Chance.

• Real living – existence – begins outside of the predictable routine of the Jennings’ house, which is a construct for the order and routine of rational thought. Living is done in the real world.

• When he walks out Jennings’ door Chance is sound-tracked with funk music synonymous with the 1970s ghetto which he enters. The piece is an arrangement of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in an obvious link to Nietzsche and having (through a different, orchestral version) associations with space exploration and the leaving behind of the familiar and safe. (Nietzsche’s book by the same name was published in the previous decade.)

• Chance lives in the present, without ambition or plans, even for food and water. He reacts with the naïve simplicity of a child or an animal. Kierkegaard’s message was that (the Christian) life demands a meaningful existence through fundamental faith, simplicity and integrity; however Kierkegaard and the existentialists also require subjective awareness and Chance is not aware of the real meaning of his existence within a world of people, needs, temptations/opportunities and achievements.

• The irrational works for Chance, even though it is largely misinterpreted.

• Heidegger asserts the importance of language and defines this to include communicative silence, but in both speech and silence Chance’s use of language are tangential largely to his intentions.

• Sartre believes that true freedom is evident in the ability to say “no”. Chance does not ever confront his situation negatively; rather acquiescence and luck are how he flows through life.

• The movers and shakers of business, politics and the media can only make sense of Chance’s words through their own constructs and are satirised as broadly as the Laputins in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as absurdly Cartesian. However, Chance survives because of (and despite) his honesty and acceptance of others.

• Chance shows none of Nietzsche’s will to power or Sartre’s will to action. He simply reacts. Existentialists require engagement in the world, a positive creative existence, familiar with struggle, not simply prospering in ignorance.

• The movie ends with Chauncey Gardiner commencing an existence with Eve in a world outside the pressures of society; the innocent, pre-Fall Eden of the Rand estate.

• Sartre says that a man is his life. This may be seen as true for Chance.

• More than promoting existentialism, the movie might be seen to espouse blind, unthinking faith (“Suffer the little children to come unto me for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven”, etc.); however to me it is more of a satire on the herd-like stupidity of systems in Western society and of the absurd cult of celebrity in which one would be happy to read more and more significance into the mundane actions of people to the extent that one might believe that Chauncey Gardiner even walked on water.

• The tag-line is “Life is a state of mind”. True in so many ways; not least in the mind of Chance, in the minds of all who met him, all who heard of his reputation, all who live in the real world outside fiction, all who watched the movie.

Bob Rosania shares his insights:

I happened to catch the last half of the movie, over a cup of coffee, on cable this morning and I really came to appreciate the greatness of this teleplay. It's a rare movie that allows its viewer to become an active observer and interpreter of the narrative that is "told." That is something I have found largely reserved for books.

I believe this movie, is entirely true to form as is the main character. The director leaving each of us to have our own individual perceptions with our interaction with the story, just as the characters we watched had with Chance. There are so many levels of interpretation to this movie, so much that can be analysed, it truly was a great achievement in film making history.

I have read one of Roger Ebert's review and found his take interesting, but I disagreed with his assertion that the narratives which included sexual overtones were out of place.

The study of Chance's character may be the focus for some, but I actually found the opposite to be more telling, the study of everyone around him, both as individuals who directly interacted with him as well as groups of individuals who were more removed, including:

1)\\tThe aspiring/ambitious: as embodied in the characters of the lawyer who kicked chance out of the home or the news media

2)\\tThe powerful or perceived powerful: as embodied in the President

3)\\tThe truly powerful who control the powerful: as embodied by Benjamin Rand and his close circle of other members of the Illuminati (as suggested in the visual of the pyramid with the all seeing eye).

There are certainly more, but these four stuck out in my mind..

With the first group, there was fear, cynicism, and perhaps even envy which came from the lack of understanding who or what Chance was or the desire to have his associations (and perceived power) and as a consequence worked to undermine his existence.

In some respects I feel it was a look at some of the "Seven Deadly Sins," and in this respect there were, I believe, religious undertones. This group generally consisted of those who desired to have something that they did not. They coveted.

With the second, there was also fear and doubt of how one was perceived as being authoritative or not requiring validation of others (especially Chance). With this group there was insecurity and fear of losing what they already had.

With these first two groups, the embodiment of Chance was generally perceived as a threat.

For the third group, Chance's character served to as a calming force, a force which was looked upon as eliminating fear...fear of death, fear of the forces of nature, fear of the future of existential things that cannot be controlled. This third group had the instinct to trust in Chance and trust in the Natural Order and yet remain comfortable in their positions of control. Perhaps to even use the perceptions of Chance as a means to control the society at large. This group represents the institutions of our global society.

The ending can be interpreted in so many ways.

Chance did strike me as a Christ-like character, but I actually didn't see him as a divine character, literally. The moral of the story is actually expressed concisely as the last spoken words, "Life is a state of mind."

I think the real message of this story is if Life is truly as state of mind, then anything is possible. We are only limited by our imagination.

On a blog that I started (and have yet to really feed), I wrote the following:

Is our universe constrained by physical boundaries or is its vastness limited only by the limits of our own imagination, placed upon ourselves?

Certainly there are parallels to spirituality that are being explored here. It's been my personal belief for some time that we all have the potential for divinity. The Bible says as much and I think for those who believe in a Divine Being, that we are indeed made in his image. Even if one discounts the written words of a religious book, it seems logical to me that this could be the case.

It felt to me the estate of Mr Rand could be reasonably interpreted as being the Garden of Eden. I believe the choice of name of McClain's character as "Eve" was quite deliberate to underscore this subtle notion.

With Chance, we have a character who was never taught the societal norms. He was not subject to the limitations that we often impose on ourselves or others. In some respects, knowledge comes with its own sets of limitations of what we as individuals can or cannot do, both within our society and within our interaction with the physical universe. It's as if he never took a bite of the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and not having done that he remained free of the limitations of knowledge and the Sin that comes from it.

Chance was the Adam who never took the bite and therefore never had to leave the Garden of Eden--Chance was not successfully "tempted" by Eden. In the wake of Ben's death, it was made clear that Eve was going to stay on with the estate, with the clear implication so was Chance. It would be their protected space.

Without Original Sin, Chance (Adam) and Eve never would have left the Garden. And what would Adam have been if he stayed in the Garden of Eden? A Gardener, of course!

My thanks for taking the time to read this page - I hope you have found it of some value.

Stuart Fernie


Sep 13, 2017

I am white. That's all you know about me. Am I privileged based on that alone and assuming I am, should I feel guilt and what should I do about it?

Are you ‘privileged’ in the sense of avoiding some disadvantage minorities face? Maybe.

Should you feel guilt? No.

Should you do anything about it ? No.

Democracy is not concerned - at all - with privilege. It protects only your rights.

Band Aid not available in your skin color? Non issue. Nobody from your ethnic group won an Oscar? Irrelevant. People eye you suspiciously when you walk at night? Sorry, but that happens. News media doesn’t give you a fair shake? Sucks, yea, but they’re free to do that.

Does your ethnic group get longer prison sentences for the same offense? Now you have my attention - that is a violation of their right to due process. Which has nothing to do with the privilege of the white guy who got half as much time, and everything to do with illegal discrimination on the part of the courts.

So talk to me about your rights. I am not interested in ‘privilege’. America never promised you any privileges; you have no claim against someone who has them, you aren’t ‘woke’ due to a lack of them.

This is the fundamental disconnect between the “Social Justice Warrior” wave of identity politics and Western Democracy.


Sep 14, 2017

What should I know before writing a story taking place in summer 1984?

I graduated high school that year.

Prince’s movie Purple Rain was a phenom. The ‘answering machine’ - a voicemail device using audio tape was enjoying a brief time in the sun. When you got home and the red light was blinking - you had a message and were thus cool.

Condoms were to prevent pregnancy - otherwise sex was safe. Cigarette smoking was finally in decline; you could smoke in people’s houses but they’d often have to improvise an ash tray.

There was a wave across the 50 states of hiking the drinking age up from 18 to 21. An ounce of weed went from 40 bucks to 80 bucks, but was more potent. More serious drugs had little to no presence in small town America (excepting LSD and Mescaline.)

Video arcades and record stores was where teens would hang out.

The Walkman - with the big foam headphones - were really becoming a thing in ‘84.

The Police’s album Ghost in the Machine dominated the airwaves. That’s the FM airwaves for you younger folk. The better Walkmen had them, but most people would make an audiotape from a vinyl record, or recorded from the radio, in order to carry in their Walkman.

When you got home from the video arcade, lots of kids would play more videogames on their home console.

Computers were of no personal interest except to geeks. The spreadsheet software VisiCalc had taken the business world by storm, but kids didn’t have computers and couldn’t even type.

The roadways featured a startling number of Japanese cars. Boxy, simple, reliable and cheap. “Made in Japan” - once a euphemism for a lousy product - took on a new meaning.

Crime was peaking in urban areas like NYC. Cities were generally considered dangerous by small town America.

Perhaps most importantly of all is what was missing - cell phones. When you left the house - you had no way of knowing where any of your friends are. So people behaved differently - they were more … predictable.

In 1984 - you’re walking around by yourself. You don’t feel like playing video games and, in fact, have no money. But you head to the arcade because that is everybody’s ‘default’ behavior, so that they can meet up. Hang-outs like this served as a sort of social beacon in a way that is no longer seen today.

And perhaps this is my own youthful optimism I’m remembering, but it seems to me that there was this general sense that … great things were stirring. That we would grow old in a world much better and very different than the world we grew up in.


Sep 16, 2017

What is something that needs to be said?

Identity politics has paralyzed the Left.


Sep 16, 2017

What would you do if you were the only person of your sex left on Earth?

Hydrate!


Sep 21, 2017

Who are some of the most knowledgeable writers on Machine Learning on Quora?

Have to give a shout-out to Tarry Singh here. He writes a lot of great content on Machine Learning, and is equally happy to respond to both newbie and expert level queries.


Sep 21, 2017

What are some of the best 50 VG/50 PG vape juices?

I make my own juices these days, but my favorite - by a mile - off the shelf juice is Cold Fusion - Shock and Awe.

It is guaranteed to blow your face off with Mango, Peach, and secret ingredients of which we must never speak.

Shock & Awe

I find the stuff so tasty, that I stopped buying it because it would cause me to vape non stop. The mix is 30/70, not 50/50, but whatever.


Sep 21, 2017

What are some of the most difficultly written machine learning algorithms?

The game of Go, and Google’s recent solution to it, represents a high water mark in machine learning.

AlphaGo - Wikipedia

The reason that Go had been so difficult to crack is addressed here -

Why is Go (board game) so difficult for AI programs to master?


Sep 22, 2017

How do you deal with pushy people in your life?

Seize territory.

Twice Germany attacked its neighbors in the 20th century, each time not only did it fail, but it lost a great deal of the territory it once held. After 2 bouts of this, Germany became one of the most peace-loving countries on earth.

The following technique for pushy people in the work place is something I discovered quite some years ago. I’ve seen it work repeatedly, I can only guess as to the reasons why.

Don’t just deny the pushy person what they seek, make sure they lose ground for being pushy. Like this,

you : “So some bug has cropped up in the system, it’s a killer. We’re going to try to get it resolved in the next two days.”

That is unacceptable! Unacceptable! You get this fixed in 24 hours or else!”

“So this issue has critical business implications?”

You’re damned right it does! 24 hours!”

“Given the critical implications involved, you need the full story. 2 days is an optimistic estimate, not a worse case scenario. The fact is, we haven’t diagnosed the problem yet, so certainly cannot guarantee a solution within 2 days. If we need a drop-dead date, we need to say 4 days.”

What !? I just told you I need it tomorrow!”

“And I heard you, and it’s why this conversation is so important. I can’t even say with confidence it’ll be wrapped up in four days. I’m assuming our business strategy isn’t that of Denial, so I’m giving it to you straight. There is even risk at 4 days out. 5 to be safe. Oh - and I’ll need another developer to tag team it.”

You get the idea. As their fury escalates, maintain steely calm, providing professional and respectful reasons to take away the very thing they seek. They walk away, having exhausted their fury only to lose ground.

This has a startling effect in the future. The next time a crisis erupts, the pushy person will avoid you like the plague. (They will tend to avoid you at other times as well.)

Which frees you up to, you know, solve actual problems.


Sep 24, 2017

How do you learn to care about your addiction enough to consider trying to stop?

You may be interested in an addiction treatment program called SmartRecovery : Self Help Addiction Recovery. It is grounded in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

The first stage of this program is the Cost Benefit Analysis : Four Questions About My Addiction, where you sit down and really think hard about how your addiction both harms and benefits you. You write it all up rather carefully in order to summon and maintain motivation to stop.


Sep 25, 2017

Which Quorans should be new (first-time) members of the Top Writers Class of 2018?

The fourteen year old math prodigy who writes answers on algebraic topology FFS, is a shoo-in but I want to mention him first so I can bask in reflected glory. Lev Kruglyak

Machine Learning is all the rage these days, and Tarry Singh has it in spades.

(I promise this will be my only nomination-by-rhymed-couplet.)

History is always a neglected topic amongst you hipster valley nerds. Cem Arslan writes tight answers loaded with substance and isn’t shy about controversy.

Jeff Mwangi is a generalist and writes on all sorts of topics with extra focus on outer space (he’s an aeronautical engineer.) He’s gained 1,000 followers already in less than a year. He’s also from Kenya and we’ve got, like, zero top writers from Kenya. Just sayin’.

Lastly, and most obvious of all, is myself, Christopher Reiss . While it is true I mostly type out whatever inane crap enters my head and run off to ignore all the comments suggesting various forms of psychiatric intervention, I want a quill.

Actually, it’s the stuff I want. The jacket or bag or snuggie or whatever it is this year. You can give my quill to someone else so long as I get the free stuff.

Seriously though.

I want the stuff.


Sep 25, 2017

What's normal to have but really strange if you own a lot of it?

Eyeballs.


Sep 25, 2017

Does it make a programmer weak for using Google or Stack Overflow when coding?

Quite the opposite, weakness lies in being too hemmed in by ego to make use of every available resource that saves times and reduces risk.

You should minimize the code you write yourself, since each line of code takes time and introduces risk.

Even if it’s something simple, just a single line or two that you know how to write, you can use the opportunity to improve your programming style. Every language has its own culture, set of idioms, standard of elegance.

For example. in python, you know you can add two lists together like this :

for x in list_a :

list_b.append(x)

This works fine, but if you search first on how to do it, you find this :

list_b.extend(list_a)

Now your code is slightly better. Most importantly, now you are better too. By compulsively looking up even the things you know perfectly well how to do, you can quickly up your game.


Sep 25, 2017

How can you tell if you are in a wrong job?

Think fast :

Would you recommend working there to a friend ?

No? Then be your own friend and leave.


Sep 26, 2017

How do you get past the Boston Globe paywall?

I’m not about stealing content, however : the media companies need to come up with a different strategy than asking users to subscribe to 20 different sources in order to get diverse news coverage.

Whether or not you should use a chrome extension such as Mercury Reader to steer around the paywall (and suppress ads) is an ethical choice which is entirely your own.


Sep 27, 2017

What do people remember about Quora credits?

It was letting the lunatics run the asylum.

Now nobody runs the asylum.

Which, it turns out, is much noisier.


Sep 27, 2017

What’s going on when my girl will not answer any of the same questions she makes me answer?

“Criticism is the sincerest form of autobiography.” — Oscar Wilde

She is probing you for her own flaws. Take notes.


Sep 27, 2017

I am 18 and I am learning different programming languages. Should I focus more on a particular language or should I try out different languages? What would be best for me as a beginner?

From my own experience,

Learning multiple languages at once is fine so long as you stagger the start. You want to have some level of comfort with one language before doing “Hello world” in another.

Firstly, it should be fun so that you can see quick results and show them to your friends. For this I’d recommend JavaScript and JQuery. You can make client-side web apps which you can then show off to your friends. Upload it to a free Amazon server and people can see it on their phones.

Then I’d suggest Python. It has a reputation of being the language of choice for “smart people”.

The third should be your own choice. I would like to pitch Lisp, but you should make up your own mind.


Sep 28, 2017

Why do you find Social Justice Warriors insufferable?

Me? OK.

Because their only evident desire is to change the way I speak and act. They want me to change the pronouns I use, get ‘woke’ and ‘check my privilege.’

Aside from this petty insistence there really isn’t anything else there. I’ve been secretly doing an experiment for two years now, which I will share for the first time here.

When they try to modify my speech or behavior for the greater good, I counter by changing the topic :

“Anyway, I’m really interesting in getting clean drinking water to Central Africa. Not in a relief capacity but a permanent infrastructure so it’s sustainable.”

I’ve never heard a response of any kind. Not once. In two years.

That’s why I find them insufferable. For all their bluster, they actually give zero fucks about humanity.


Sep 28, 2017

Who do you think secretly likes you on Quora?

Serge.

He’s not on much due to multiple bans and intermittent incarceration but still.


Oct 1, 2017

Which things during a conversation must a boy avoid while talking to a girl/senior, so that he can talk her without hesitation and with confidence?

You don’t learn to ride a bicycle by thinking about not falling.

You learn by practicing until you no longer have to think about falling.


Oct 1, 2017

How do you feel about me having a million views on Quora?

On Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification.

Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope.

If you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your million views.

(Apologies to George S Kaufman.) A quote by George S. Kaufman


Oct 1, 2017

If human history was different would the technology we developed also been different?

I don’t think so. It’s easy to connect the dots retroactively :

“World war II led to the cold war, which gave rise to rockets, and silicon chips and computers … “ etc, yada.

But taking the long view, there is a sense that science and technology take on their own momentum.

First came fire and basic weapons made of stone. This phase lasted most of human history.

Then came domestication of animals, farming, and permanent structures made of wood and stone. This lasted perhaps 5,000 more years.

Finally we learn to make metals. Our weapons and farming tools get a huge boost and our societies got much bigger and more organized.

Now the written word is invented to communicate across distance and time. Note - importantly, there really wasn’t any need for the written word when we were small bands of nomadic hunters. Only larger, stable societies make use of it.

Technology has given rise to technology.

Now that things can be written down, knowledge begins to accrue from one generation to the next. Schools are created to transmit this knowledge. People become ever more expert at architecture, soldiering, civic planning, governing. Large cities begin to sprawl into empires.

Empires require fast moving armies. Roads. Horses. Messengers.

And so on, from metal to writing, writing to schools, schools to empire, empire to armies, to roads and ships, and so on to navigation, exploration, astronomy, gunpowder, steam, electricity, radio, right up to the modern day.

The particulars of how each new stage begins are very sensitive to history, but one gets the sense that the stage has already been set and is awaiting a spark - any spark - to start it going.

Looking back, one thing is common at every stage. The next stage seems so … obvious in retrospect. You want to grab Faraday and shake him, “A motor! You’ve got a motor right there ! Scale it up! Make it three phase! Attach it to a carriage and whiz around town on it!”

Not because we’re smarter than Faraday (we’re not.) But because the next step is so powerful, so transformative and so simple in retrospect that it’s just bound to happen within a few generations.


Oct 1, 2017

Are the residents of Salem, MA generally tired of hearing about witches?

Not really, there are lots of modern witches and Wiccans there now, so witchcraft is very much a part of their lives.

As for the history, Salem residents seem to enjoy setting the record straight on a number of points. For example, most tourists don’t know :

Each victim of the witch trials died a truly heroic death - voluntarily. Each of them needed only confess to being a witch to save their lives. They preferred to die rather than betray their faith and live a lie.

The aftermath of the Witch Trials gave rise to the “innocent until proven guilty” form of US criminal (and civil law).

The Judge of the witch trials spent the rest of his life doing penance for his misdeeds. Every day he wore a “hair shirt”, made of prickly, uncomfortable hairs on the inside as a self-imposed punishment.

The accusers mostly came to a bad end, these girls were abandoned by their families and communities, taking to things like drink and prostitution.

Salem was the merest footnote to the thousands of victims of witch trials throughout Europe.

They weren’t burnt at the stake, they were hanged. Not hung. Hanged.

However, residents do often wish that Salem’s full history got equal attention. Salem was a major hub in the underground railroad, and often a freed slave’s last stop before a ship carried him to Canada. It is one of the earliest American settlements and a thriving port, with trade coming in from China and India. All sorts of things like that.

If people come for the Witches and then get to know that stuff, well - we’re cool with that too.


Oct 2, 2017

Is Quora a (personal) barrier-crossing/destroying machine? Requiring total deranged submission, and exploiting one's trust and potential openness, while being really condescending and disrespectful?

Wow.

It’s a Q and A site.


Oct 3, 2017

I think I have asthma. My mom says I’m fine, but I can tell something is wrong. How can I make her take me to see a doctor about it?

This is a little disconcerting. Parents have nearly complete control over their children’s lives, except when it comes to health care. They are legally obligated to seek medical care for potentially serious conditions, with some states making (controversial) exemptions for religious reasons.

I’m not saying your mom is a criminal or even that she’s wrong. It’s just that she isn’t qualified to determine if you’re fine.

I would walk into a doctors office in your town and tell them what you stated in your question. They will probably agree to give you a quick look.

They will also probably call your mom (especially if it turns out you do have asthma) and adjust her … perspective.


Oct 4, 2017

How should I respond to my boss who fired me via email and let him know that I’m very disappointed that he did not have the courtesy to do this face-to-face (we work from different states, but always communicate through video calls)?

Send your resume to your boss’ boss, asking for your boss’ job.

Seriously, if he can’t even fire people properly, how can he be expected to hire people? Insist you can do better.

If they fire him, and you get the job, quit. By email. CC your old boss.

None of this will do any good of course, but it might be fun.


Oct 4, 2017

A colleague always uses goto in C++ code. Is it a bad practice?

Always?

I’m not dogmatic, and I maintain there are valid use cases for goto.

However :

I don’t know of any.

In 25 years of writing a programming language, simulators, AI crap, browser stuff (webkit) I have not once opted for a goto. I have no compunction about doing that - I just had no occasion to.

You say your coworker always uses them. One of us is an idiot.

I am not an idiot.

Joking aside, this is a real human being who might be a good (potential) programmer who just stopped advancing to learn the whole language. But however he got to where he is, lots of gotos creates a bad Code smell - Wikipedia and will do real damage to this persons rep at this and any other job. We get to laugh but s/he is cursed to walk the earth an outcast.

Please - send them here. Let the healing begin.


Oct 5, 2017

Why do black lives matter? Why is it so controversial to say "all lives matter" instead? Is it insensitive to do this?

Elsewhere on this page, you will hear lots of gentle advice. Especially allegories of the form, “A house is on fire. You don’t call the fire department and say all houses need to be safe. You report the particular house that’s on fire.”

They will place a paternal palm on your soldier, “Are ya starting to get it, kiddo?”

Bullshit.

It’s a bad word choice. The fundamental reason that ‘black lives matter’ is simply that black folk are human folk. And all human lives matter.

When we say “all lives matter” - firstly, we have gotten to the more general reason that black lives matter. Secondly, we have answered racism with a non racial appeal to unity.

It’s civil rights. Not black rights.

Kindly get your hand off my shoulder.


Oct 6, 2017

What are your thoughts on the anti-SJW (social justice warrior) movement?

The SJW movement is a small but vocal tumor that appeared within the Left in the last few years. It is under heavy attack from both normal liberals and conservatives.

You can’t call all white people racist. You can’t insist people change the words they use. You can’t pretend to have PTSD when you don’t get your way. You can’t misrepresent statistics like the wage gap.

Because you gain no ground, and come under attack from the entire political spectrum.

I trust the reader is familiar with the Right Wing attacks on SJWs, so I’ll provide a few links showing incoming fire from the Left itself.

WATCH: President Obama Warns of Danger of Safe Spaces At Howard Grad Speech

Sanders slams identity politics as Democrats figure out their future

Opinion | The End of Identity Liberalism (Mark Lilla, NYT.)

To the OP’s question - what are my thoughts about the anti SJW movement? There isn’t a single movement, rather the SJW faction of liberalism is like Hitler in 1945, losing badly on all fronts, barricaded in his bunker becoming ever more shrill, deluded, and unyielding.

This modern McCarthyism has run its brief course to zero positive effect and - yes - it may just have got Trump elected.

In the end, identity is opposed to equality. Because equality demands - by definition - that we are race-blind in thought and action. Yes - of course we see skin color. But we ignore it when judging a person’s merits.

“But we can’t ignore centuries of oppression, nor the invisible napsack of privileges that - “

Yes, we can. And must. That’s what equality is. We aren’t going to treat oppressed classes preferentially as a corrective measure. That’s the choice we make when we seek equality.

Everyone knows this, and always did.

The SJW phenomenon - to be blunt - has more to do with smartphone technology than politics. It became a way for young people to channel their diffuse resentment without having to read anything, learn anything, or do anything.

“It is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — Macbeth


Oct 6, 2017

Which one should I use, JavaScript or jQuery with AJAX? I know JQuery is a JavaScript library.

I agree with Robert Rossney , and will add a bit. To be clear, JQuery is a layer on top of JavaScript that began as a way to manage the unwieldy tree of elements in a web page (the DOM), but grew until it covered nearly everything.

This is important because JavaScript got a rough start in life. It began as a way to add some extra decoration or functionality to a page, but then mutated and evolved, while the web itself was also changing.

The result is JavaScript works, but is very cumbersome. It shouldn’t be used for production code.

JQuery is technically just a library, sure - but it’s better understood as a layer atop JavaScript. It changes almost everything, from getting page elements, populating data structures, executing XHR requests, and so on.

Don’t leave home without it.

As you’re learning, it is probably a good idea to begin with straight JavaScript, but then quickly move on to JQuery. If you begin with JQuery, there is probably no harm done either.


Oct 6, 2017

Why don't Nigerians offer fact/experienced based opinions and statements during online and offline conversations?

Please don’t mask statements as a question on Quora. Reporting as insincere.


Oct 6, 2017

Two tungsten electrodes are separated by 1 cm in a perfect vacuum. The electrical potential difference between them is increased until a current flows. What will I see?

The electrodes will heat up and glow the question made them tungsten so they’d not melt first. That’s all though, there wont be sparks between them as there is no air to heat up and form lightening. this might change as some of the tungsten boils off into vapor.


Oct 6, 2017

What distinguishes a great software engineer from a good one?

A good developer makes things hard to break.

A great one makes things easy to fix.


Oct 8, 2017

What is some popular wrong advice that has been mistakenly considered good?

“Talk about it. Let it out. Don’t repress.”

This is all Freud’s fault. Between cocaine binges, Freud advocated that feelings are like liquid - they build up and we have to let them out.

It has a seed of truth in extreme cases like childhood trauma. In normal day-to-day living, however, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support this.

The problem when you let it out to a loved one or coworker is that it has now taken external form and camped out in your relationships. Constant bloodletting wears down all your relationships until your life basically sucks.

Feelings like anger and sadness pass without letting them out. The less attention you pay them the quicker they pass. Feelings aren’t facts, and it’s your choice to starve negative feelings of energy or hand them the keys to your central generator.

A sad consequence of this dynamic is that many, many people in therapy become incompetent in relationships and really mess up their lives.


Oct 8, 2017

If you were convinced your significant other was gaslighting you, but you really didn't want to lose them or the relationship, how do you cope?

Can we please reclaim the true meaning of the term ‘gaslighting’ ? It’s been co-opted by pop psychology (not real psychology) to dramatize what is really pretty typical human behavior.

The term, from the Hitchcock film, means to screw around with a person’s surroundings so they come to believe they are crazy. Try it on your room-mate, it’s great fun. Each day, add a new tooth brush in bathroom secretly. Wait until there are like 12 of them and your roommate mentions it. Feign ignorance. Then start supergluing them to the sink, one per day. Etc.

The goal is to make them doubt their sanity. Nothing else. Nothing else!

As such, this isn’t something that comes up all that often. That’s why it has an odd name that references a century old house fixture.

In pop psychology, ‘gas-lighting’ refers to all the typical ways people disagree : they have a different retelling of events and will challenge your view of things. They aren’t trying to convince you that you are crazy, just that you are wrong.

If the person realizes they are wrong but digs in their heels anyway, they may deny facts that are plainly obvious and deliberately misremember events,

Again, this is normal. You are not in a scary movie. In a reflective moment, you can see yourself doing it at various points in your life.

“Gas Lighting” is bullshit. Give the term back to Hitchcock.


Oct 16, 2017

How do I change the background picture on an Ubuntu 17.04 on the command line?

Ubuntu 17.04 still uses the Unity desktop, so this should do the trick :

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri /home/myhome/picture.png

Where the last filepath is the fullpath to the actual image file you wish to use.


Oct 16, 2017

What do you feel about climate change? Are you really afraid for your next generations?

Climate change will destroy civilization and lay waste to most of the human species. It’s not about carbon emissions, and it is not a cautionary tale about the folly of Man.

It’s not even ‘change’, really - it’s just climate. Earth’s geologic history shows that warm periods - like the one we live in now, are pauses between ice ages. The pause lasts roughly 10,000 years, the ice age lasts about 100,000. From the Vostok Ice Core data, we can see the last 5 ice ages during the last half million years.

Above the dotted line, is what we’re used to. Below the dotted line … New York City is under a mile of ice.

Look to the right of the graph, and guess what happens next? We’re already overdue for the next ice age.

Humans have somehow held onto life during these barren periods of intense cold, though just barely at times, clinging to a genetic ‘bottleneck’ of less than 50,000.

For the first time, however, we know that the next one is coming. Soon. The alarm could not be more clear or more urgent.

There is so much we could do. Plan a new global society to endure, reduce population, create a food supply, preserve technology and culture.

How strange it is, how tragic, how … human that we are blaming each other, arguing over smokestacks and windmills, excorcising the demons of Big Oil that lurk in our midsts, appeasing the Goddess of Mother Earth that she may be merciful.

And how very human that nobody is doing the one thing that science demands of us : Accept the truth and build for the future.


Oct 17, 2017

Why can't I give up my addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for my children? They should be enough to make me want to quit.

Addiction, by definition, is the inability to stop a behavior despite your intention to do so. There are many possible explanations for this, one which I favor is that the brain is a complex machine which is sabotaged by psychoactive substances. These substances ‘hijack’ your brain’s survival mechanisms and subvert your ability to act in accordance with your best decisions.

Whether you believe that or not, one thing that is broadly agreed upon is the solution. Forgive your failures - they simply indicate that your are indeed fighting real addictions. But don’t give yourself permission for that next failure. Yes - this is rather a zen mind trick that is hard to master.

Support helps. Join a support group. Don’t hesitate to quit the group if you feel it isn’t right for you and join another.

Especially beware of anybody that tells you that only their solution will work for you. Unfortunately there is a lot of fanaticism in support groups - do reject that and embrace your freedom to choose what feels best. Trust your instinct.

Talk to your doctor. There is very effective medication to fight both alcohol and nicotine addiction (naltrexone and buproprion, for example.)

It takes more than just an initial decision. It requires you to keep fighting when you see the decision was not enough.

“Be not afraid of going slowly. Be afraid of standing still.” — Unknown Chinese Proverb

Oct 20, 2017

What can you do? Tell me anything.

I can brew beer.

I don’t drink alcohol. But if some disaster strikes society, I figure being able to make beer will get me into the better survivor camps.


Oct 28, 2017

What do you think happened to America to bring about a President like Trump?

I’ve got an answer, but first we need to stop with the hyperbole.

Trump is not a racist. Or, if he is, that isn’t why he was elected. There aren’t enough racists in America to elect anybody. Obama was twice elected. Every politician denies being a racist, because racists are almost universally reviled in America. Nobody is “dog whistling”. Those numbers just don’t work.

Trump is not a sexist. Well, OK - he probably is, but that isn’t what swung the election. If just 10% of the women who voted for Trump had voted Clinton, the election would have come out differently.

This was not a victory for fascism, misogyny, or racism. The truth is far simpler, albeit less dramatic.

Trump is an unqualified moron. He’s in way over his head, has no idea what he is doing, and his only apparent motivation is vanity.

So how did we elect him? It was Social Media. Social media changed the relationship between voters and candidates. Whereas once your news was curated through a half dozen media companies controlling newspapers and television, now it came to you through Facebook and Twitter, unfettered by any editorial filter.

Suddenly there no longer existed what we might call the “media veto”. You know, how every newspaper eventually comes out and declares their support for a candidate. Trump pulled less than 2% of the major papers.

This would likely have killed a candidate in the past, as donors would shy away and media focus elsewhere.

Similarly, a refusal to release his tax returns would have imposed a media death sentence where positive coverage would be ever scarcer.

But this election was different. The electorate had access to vastly more information than ever before, beyond the control of the usual gate-keepers. Every stump speech was available on Youtube. Articles from hundreds of sources got broadcast through Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media brought the candidates closer to us. We learned far more about them, on demand, curated by our social network.

Hillary doesn’t look good up close. Trump does. I’m talking about personality here, not politics. Trump is authentic. Hillary is mercurial, mechanically hitting her talking points, painfully transparent and pandering.

Early in the election, I wondered what the appeal of Trump was. I went to Youtube and watched a campaign speech in its entirety. I’d suggest you try it - any speech will do.

Trump is completely relaxed in front of a camera. He improvises as he goes, swears occasionally, vents his candid aspirations. He’s real. You may disagree vehemently with every word out of his mouth, but you feel as if you’d met the man himself.

Hillary seems ever elusive, and gives only the impression of a very capable, very polished liar.

Social media brings us closer, and liars just don’t look good up close.

In much the same way that the new medium of television was credited for the Kennedy victory, I propose that it’s social media that has fundamentally changed the game.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that a camera-ready, twitter-active candidate came out of nowhere and upended business as usual.

So it’s not racism. It’s not sexism. Fascism has not come to America. It’s just that media is evolving and as we run to catch up, we are bound to stumble.

In the long run, this is all for the best. Nothing is more democratic than people taking control of their media.


Oct 28, 2017

Who is going to the Quora World Meetup in Boston on Thursday, November 9, 2017?

We got a +2 here!

Right, Alexandra Pell ?


Oct 30, 2017

Is “Make America Great Again” really a euphemism for “take back America” by white men from non-white men?

C’mon, my fellow Democrats. Knock it off.

I swear we are the only group who would somehow find a way to be smug in defeat. Yea, that’s right, we lost - lost hard - to a weak candidate, due to our moral superiority over the Trump voters who were torch wielding racists. It had nothing to do with Hillary.

Democrats - grow up. Seriously. This is bullshit and you know it.

“Make America great again” is not a dog whistle to bring back Jim Crow. M.A.G.A. is a standard conservative cry, it means nothing more now than when Reagan used it in the 80’s.

The 9.2% of Obama voters didn’t defect to Trump because they woke up racist.

We lost because Democrats didn’t get off their ass and head to the polls. Because the DNC rigged the primary against Sanders (and got caught). Because Wikileaks exposed Clinton handing out government positions like a seating chart at a wedding reception. Because we didn’t adapt to a changing digital landscape where Youtube matters more than CNN. Because Hillary was too mechanical, too rehearsed. Because the Left became so emboldened by success - a black president, gay marriage - that it took to screaming at white men to “check your privilege.”

We fucked it up and deserved to lose. It might feel good to say we lost to racism, but we shouldn’t feel good when we lose. We need to look at our own mistakes and learn from them. Next time, a candidate people can connect with. Run an honest primary. Have an expert lock down emails and assume they will be made public anyway. Stop with the ‘privilege’ BS. Connect with the electorate in a more direct way.

The whole thing reminds me of a scene from the 80’s film, The Breakfast Club. Two kids are talking in detention :

Brian: See, we had this assignment, to make this ceramic elephant, and um...and we had eight weeks to do it and we're s'posed to, and it was like a lamp, and when you pull the trunk, the light was s'posed to go on. My light didn't go on; I got an F on it. Never got an F in my life. When I signed up, you know—for the course, I mean—I thought I was playing it real smart, you know. 'Cause I thought, "I'll take shop; it'll be such an easy way to maintain my grade point average."
John: Why'd you think it'd be easy?
Brian: Have you seen some of the dopes that take shop?
John: I take shop. You must be a fuckin' idiot!
Brian: I'm a fuckin' idiot because I can't make a lamp?
John: No, you're a genius because you can't make a lamp.

We thought beating Trump would be easy, and we underestimated him. Are we idiots for losing to Trump?

No. We’re geniuses for losing to Trump.

So, you geniuses of racial harmony - here’s a radical suggestion : Accept that we fucked it up. Ourselves. Not as smart as we thought.

OK? Because we’ve got 40 months to make a lamp that works.


Nov 1, 2017

How is snus made?

Interesting question - the remarkable thing about the way snus (a form of oral tobacco from Sweden) is made is that carcinogens exist in only trace amounts.

It turns out that tobacco, as it grows naturally, doesn’t cause cancer. It’s when we burn it that all sorts of cancer causing chemicals are created, especially TSNAs (Tobacco-specific nitrosamines).

You might think that chewing tobacco would avoid the combustion, but the problem is that tobacco must be cured - preserved somehow. Otherwise, it’s just a leaf - it would wilt and decay to turn to crud.

Most chewing tobacco is fire-cured - brought to near-burning temperature. Temperature high enough to produce TSNA’s and cause cancer.

Snus, however, is gently heated using steam, in a process more akin to pasteurization. This creates a very different product which, remarkably, does not require a person to spit. It’s less offensive to the palate, the stomach, and almost free of carcinogens. (So much so that the FDA is still mulling over the question of removing the cancer warning on Snus.)

I can’t speak to American-produced snus, but this process is very strictly controlled in Sweden by the Swedish Match - GOTHIATEK® standard which keeps strict tabs on trace carcinogens.

I used snus for a while, it’s pretty good once you get used to ‘rolling’ it into a cylinder and placing it your upper, not lower lip.


Nov 3, 2017

What is the best vape tank you have ever used?

The Aspire Atlantis. It doesn’t make huge clouds and deliver massive flavor - what it does do is work perfectly always.

Always. Drop it, sit on it, throw it at scientologists - it just never leaks or malfunctions in any way.


Nov 3, 2017

How does loose and portion snus differ?

Portion is the same stuff, simply wrapped in a mesh cloth so it’s not so messy. I find the texture disagreeable, but it makes it easier to use discreetly.


Nov 4, 2017

What are some amazing computer science algorithms?

I am not at liberty to disclose the details, but i recently came up with an algorithm which predicts the Bitcoin market. I announce its predictions in a twitter feed. It’s had rather surprising success in the two weeks since launch.

You can follow the feed here :

Lex Machina (@Lex_Machina_) | Twitter

I hope to come back and divulge all the details about how it works some day.


Nov 7, 2017

A couple of my anxiety triggers are very regularly brought up in situations in my life that I can't avoid. How can I cope with this?

For unavoidable anxiety triggers, I had success using Exposure therapy - Wikipedia. That is, deliberately expose yourself to the trigger over and over again. There is a natural weakening effect as you build a sort of tolerance, and perhaps more importantly you can practice techniques like breath-control and other tools you are using to tame your anxiety.

You are using a set of tools, right? If not, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you learn some. Anxiety is a very common and highly treatable issue. The best way to learn is to see a psychiatrist (it’s what they do!). A doctor can also help with medication.

Here’s an earlier answer of mine listing tools I found helpful : Christopher Reiss's answer to What can I do to reduce anxiety?

For Exposure Therapy in particular, it’s important that you have some of these tools or countermeasures in place, so that each round of exposure becomes slightly more managable. Without any tools, it can backfire as anticipatory anxiety builds up and it gets worse each time.

Long story short - see a doctor and practice.


Nov 8, 2017

What is something you refuse to do on Quora?

Math homework problems!

When someone is obviously just trying to crowd-source their homework, I won’t do it.

Even when I sense it’s a question not born of laziness, but of the “I tried but can’t figure it out” variety, I might answer but am careful not to give the final answer, instead sketching out the solution.

Why does this irk me so much? Maybe I see it as a selfish imposition on the good will of Quorans.

Or maybe I just don’t want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who offloaded his math homework.


Nov 9, 2017

How can one effectively answer all of these 44 arguments against evolution, debunking them one by one?

I’ll let Einstein field this one.

Some time after he published his Special Relativity paper in 1906, a skeptic retorted with a book entitled, “101 Reasons Why Not Einstein.”

When asked about the book, Einstein merely quipped, “One will suffice.”

You don’t need - and nobody need consider - 44 arguments against evolution. Go through them yourself and pick your best.

One will suffice.


Nov 10, 2017

Why do universities teach C and C++, though they are regarded as the most difficult languages and there are better alternatives? C and C++ aren’t expanding and will be dead in 30 years, but Stanford, Harvard and U Mich use C++ as a primary language.

There I was, 2 months ago. Coding away. I have always had an interest in AI, and had recently gotten interested in Cryptocurrencies.

I decided it might be fun to try to model and predict the price fluctuations in the Bitcoin market. Since it’s not directly tied to any commodity, I was curious to see if it might be possible to predict future moves based solely on the price history.

So I came up with some crazy ideas, and wrote some equations, and wrote it up in my language of choice - Python.

It produced interesting results, but it took 3 weeks of runtime to predict the next 24 hours of prices. Which isn’t much of a prediction at all.

I needed to parallel process these computations. I have a GPU and I grabbed a Python library which is designed for that sort of thing. Now the model ran 10 times faster!

So the run-time went down from 3 weeks to 2 days to forecast the next 24 hours. Same problem.

OK - fine! I grabbed the C++ version of the parallel processing library. Oh - look! I can control how memory gets used, minimize trips from the GPU to CPU, tweak each core processor. I can optimize like crazy.

I still kept the Python skeleton, but linked it to the a C++ module to do the heavy lifting.

Runtime dropped from 2 days to 30 minutes. That’s a forecast.

Note that even though I was doing rather abstract and theoretical crap - the sort of thing that usually doesn’t sully its hands with implementation details - the ability to get down and filthy with the whirling blades of the machine saved the project.

It’s actually working respectably well, so far. You can follow the project’s twitter feed here : Lex Machina (@Lex_Machina_) | Twitter .

If it keeps working and makes a ton of cash, I’ll have C++ to thank.


Nov 10, 2017

What is the safest cryptocurrency to exchange for bitcoin before the fall that might happen after the fork on November 11th?

The SegWit2x fork has been called off, mooting this question.

Edit, 11/21/2017 : The instrument described here, US Dollar Tether has claimed a hacker stole $31M, and may collapse into scandal.

I wouldn’t touch it.

H̶o̶w̶e̶v̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶s̶u̶c̶h̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶f̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶f̶u̶g̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶U̶S̶D̶T̶ ̶(̶U̶.̶S̶.̶ ̶D̶o̶l̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶T̶e̶t̶h̶e̶r̶)̶.̶ ̶I̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶‘̶p̶e̶g̶g̶e̶d̶’̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶,̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶U̶S̶ ̶d̶o̶l̶l̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶B̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶.̶

̶I̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶h̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶u̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶h̶.̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶P̶o̶l̶o̶n̶i̶e̶x̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶B̶i̶t̶r̶e̶x̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶s̶.̶


Nov 10, 2017

I believe that carrying weapons in self defence in the US violates people's freedom. The freedom to be unconcerned with violence. I believe the UK is freer in this regard. Do you agree?

That’s a trick of language which subverts the meaning of the word freedom.

You want to be free from concern. Freedom is never from. Freedom is always to.

Freedom to vote, to speak, to assemble, to protest. Free to move, to trade, to build.

Freedom from is not freedom at all.

These North Korean schoolkids have got freedom from in spades.

Their world is free from drugs, free from crime, free from dissent, from graffiti, from pornography, from popular music, free from noise, from confusion, from disagreement.

Freedom from sounds great, perhaps you might even want to visit. Just be very careful not to do yourself anything they insist on being free from. Like nicking a poster. Because they might just decide to be free from you, and you’ll wind up in a coma in prison.


Nov 11, 2017

A 15–year-old girl comes to you and slaps you across the face, and is going to slap you again. What do you do?

The first one would land, because I didn’t expect it.

The second I would avert, using this simple technique on display by Gordon Ramsey. Grab the hand, turn it and bend at the wrist, which forces her to turn away without injuring her.

Before releasing her hand, I would explain that there seems to be some mistake, and it’s best that she calm down, and we can talk about whatever has made her so angry.

See 0:51. (Looks like Gordon has a lot of practice at this.)


Nov 11, 2017

Have you ever walked out of an interview?

Once. Just once.

The interviewer was a little … stiff. Spoke with a German accent. Nothing wrong with Germans - it was just my own bias at the time that I expected them to be over-formal. Sticklers.

He asked me a question, which I didn’t like much because it was kind of basic for somebody with lots of experience, about submitting a form from a web page.

So I sketched out the answer on a white board and he asked a question, and I answered, “Yes, in that case I would add an ‘A=5’ right here.”

That was the end of the question, but before we moved on, he said, “Oh - do you want to put that?”

I said “Put that?”

Write it. On the board.”

Um … is somebody else going to read this or something?”

“No - we’re done. It’s in order to … finish the exercise.”

So you want me to write ‘A=5’, right here? What’s next?”

“Then we can just erase it and move on to the next one.”

So you need me to write A=5. And then erase it. So that the exercise is completed.”

Yes.”

Yea. No offense, really, I can tell we just wouldn’t get along at all.”

(This was the guy I would be reporting to.) As I made my awkward exit, both he and his boss made valiant efforts to change my mind, but I just offered, “It’s a gut thing. Trust me. We’d clash.”

I could never shake the hunch that as I was driving off, the interviewer gave a heavy sigh, picked up a marker, wrote “A=5” on the board, and then erased the whole thing.


Nov 14, 2017

Did you know that when people vape, they will exhale nicotine rich vapor? That means that anyone in the same air space could potentially be involuntarily breathing in nicotine. Does knowing this make you more opposed to vaping or not?

Your premise is pretty obvious. If I exhale something, people nearby will inhale a bit of it. Do you know how much nicotine, though?

Also - did you know that nicotine is present in tomatoes? The Nicotine Content of Common Vegetables — NEJM

That eating tomato soup emits nicotine vapor? Anyone in the same air space could potentially be involuntarily breathing in your nicotine cloud of soup-death.

Does knowing this make you opposed tomato soup or not?

If you answer, “Er … Ahem. Well - how much nicotine are we talking about !?”, then I think we’ve come to a good starting place for discussion.


Nov 14, 2017

In how many ways can you distribute 10 different pieces of candy into 5 identical bags so that each bag has at least one piece of candy?

You can see a more general treatment of this type of problem (which seems to come up alot on Quora) in Apoorv Khandelwal ‘s excellent treatment here:

Apoorv Khandelwal's answer to How many ways to distribute n different objects to m people, while each has at least k objects?

He gives a more general solution, especially see the part about Stirling numbers of the second kind - Wikipedia .

I leave the remaining steps to the s̶t̶u̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ reader.


Nov 16, 2017

What is x when sin2x-cosx=1?

Nope, no, no. The other answers are not just in error, but also terribly, terribly wrong (except Kevin Tong , props to you). You should be able to solve this, at first glance, without doing a whit of work.

But you’ve got to have a sense of what cos and sin really are.

They sweep out a circle, like this :

cos() is x, and sin() is y. So, look at the circle. You can see that cos(pi) is -1. And that sin(2 x pi) is 0. So x = pi is a solution.

Is it the only one? You can explore the circle and verify whether it is or not.


Nov 16, 2017

Regardless of what party you support, should Senator Al Franken resign?

I am crushed by the news. Groping a sleeping USO volunteer on a transport plane to lift the spirits of our troops in action!

I loved Al. I was hoping he’d make a run for President.

Not now. Decency demands his resignation.


Nov 16, 2017

What is the significance of the double-slit experiment?

It demonstrates that motion is not at all what you think it is.

Fire a photon at the two slits. If you’re lucky, it goes through one of them and hits the wall. Do it a thousand times (or fire a thousand photons), and count how lucky you’ve been - how many hit the wall. Let’s say 50 got through.

Now cover one of the slits, and repeat the experiment. You will see 100 got through.

By reducing the ways the photon can get through, you’ve increased the chance that it would.

If that seems like complete nonsense - it should. It is a direct assault on our most basic inuition.

But it’s true. Nature is this … insane at small enough scales.

Take some time with it. It isn’t something you ever really understand, rather you just get used to it. And don’t feel badly if you struggle. Einstein could never really accept it, insisting on some hidden gizmo cooking the books. No such gizmo has ever been found.

Nature is not backing down on this one, and we have to accept Nature as she is.

(*) I’ve over-simplified a bit. You actually get 50 both times, but with both slits opened the wall-strikes appear in alternating bands of dark and light. If you consider just the dark bands, you have decreased the chance the photon lands there by increasing the possible paths to 2 slits. The same essential mystery remains.

(**) Don’t miss the much fuller answer by Paul Mainwood , Paul Mainwood's answer to What is the significance of the double-slit experiment?


Nov 18, 2017

Why should I date women when I become a multimillionaire if they reject me while I’m poor?

Ah.

The System™ has gotten to you.

The Sytem™ wants you to believe that your most basic human needs must be delayed until you produce, produce, produce until you cross a threshold where you have evolved into a Rich Person. And then - all the world is yours. So work, and keep working.

It’s a con job. Love does not await at some threshold of wealth. The women who reject you now will also reject you w̶h̶e̶n̶ if you become a multimillionaire. Shockingly few women care about money, despite the The Sytem™’s endless insistence to the contrary.

What matters to a woman - and to a man - is how they feel in your presence. And physical attraction matters too. So, if you want love, take care of your health, be fit, and most importantly try to develop empathy, humor, and patience.

Don’t worry about becoming something. Instead, be something.


Nov 20, 2017

If all the popular Quorans died, what would their headstones say?

This writer has been collapsed.


Nov 20, 2017

I tried installing Kali Linux with Windows 10 and now I'm facing this error. I'm a noob and I only know a little bit Linux. How can I fix this error?

Ah, your ‘GRUB’, the thingy that handles dual booting, the thingy that comes up first, got hosed somehow.

Get on another machine (don’t worry, what follows is very safe and won’t hose that machine) and make a bootrepair with a usb drive.

boot-repair-disk / Home / Home

Use that to boot up your dead machine and fix its GRUB, and with any luck the clouds will part and Linux goodness will shine upon you.

Hit me up if you hit problems.


Nov 20, 2017

You are standing in front of God at St. Peter’s Gate, and you may speak one line. What is it?

“In my defense, I was left unsupervised.”


Nov 21, 2017

Why is 1×1×1×1×1×1 not equal to 1?

Alright, alright, break it up! Dunno what’s been going on here. A lotta wrong answers from 2015.

limn1n=1

If you see the definition of a limit, it demands that for any small tolerance you specify around the target value of 1 (call the tolerance epsilon),

There exists an m such that f(any n where n>m) falls within that tolerance. Put less precisely : You can get as close as you want to 1 if you pick an n large enough.

So for any tolerance, epsilon, you can just set m to 3, or 6, or 42, since f(anything) = 1, which gives no error at all, so it’s sure to be within the tolerance.

This is kind of a trivial case of the limit, normally we have to be clever and choose m as some function of epsilon. Here we can just set m to anything and walk away.


Nov 21, 2017

Distractions are one of my biggest enemies in reaching my goal, especially YouTube and Quora (not much of social media apps). How can I reduce this?

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but maybe it bears repeating.

Keep you phone next to your computer, and only access Quora and Youtube (the distractions you mention) through that. The increased friction tends to minimize use of them. Don’t cheat and open browser tabs on your desktop.


Nov 22, 2017

My sweat from my armpits smells like acetic acid (somewhat), why is that so? Is there any relationship with my diet (I am vegetarian)?

Do you drink alcohol? Because alcohol metabolizes into acetic acid (in all kinds of weird forms), which smells of vinegar (especially apple-vinegar).


Dec 1, 2017

I have an IQ level in the 99th percentile. Why do intellectual inferiors think that they can argue with me?

Oh man. The 99.99 %-ile is not going to go easy on you.


Dec 3, 2017

What happened when Floyd and the other astronauts found the Monolith on Clavius in "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

For the first time in millions of years, sunlight struck the Monolith.

Whatever alien force or higher power that placed it there, did so very deliberately. The apes who touched the first monolith deep in the past had a long way to go before they evolved and reached the moon to dig up the second Monolith.

This Monolith had been expecting them. When the sunlight strikes, the Monolith gives off a radio signal so intense that the astronauts find the sound unbearable and grab their heads.

The signal bore a simple message. It was a directional beacon, pointing toward Jupiter. Here, the third monolith - and last stage of evolution for Man - awaited.


Dec 8, 2017

What current innovations are being laughed at?

The Mutable, Permissioned Blockchain .

We’re going to take a blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, throw out the little bits like immutability (nobody can alter it) and the fact that it’s cryptographically locked down by a global bot-net, but we’re going to keep the good part … the speed !

Your company will hold the keys to edit it, and it’ll be locked down by the u̶s̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ best practices of our industry experts.

Translation - We’re going to take your own shared data-base, sell it back to you, tell you to use the damn thing more quickly because Bitcoin has exposed the fact you’ve been sitting on transactions for a day for no damn reason at all.

The Mutable, Permissioned Blockchain. The best of both worlds.


Dec 9, 2017

What's the remainder if 1234^5 is divided 35?

I keep invoking Fermat's little theorem - Wikipedia on Quora - whenever you see the remainder of an exponent, cue Mssr. Fermat :

a^p \equiv a \pmod {p} for prime p.

Now, 35 isn’t prime but don’t let that discourage you. Observe that

1234^5 \equiv 1234 \equiv 4 \pmod {5} thanks to Fermat.

And now use the trick that x y \pmod {x z} = x [y \pmod {z}] to get

7 \times 1234^5 \pmod {35} = 7 \times [1234^5 \pmod {5}] = 7 \times 4.

Dividing though by 7 gives us 1234^5 \pmod {35} = 4.

We can see how the 7 dropped out, so we can generalize to any number not a multiple of 5 (which would cause us to divide by zero above.):

1234^5 \pmod {5 n} = 4 for all n not divisible by 5 and most generally,

a^p \equiv a \pmod {b p} for prime p not a factor of b.


Dec 12, 2017

Was the US able to be totally self sufficient in WW2, or did it have to still get certain material's through trade with its allies?

We had our own abundance of all the basics : oil and iron and so forth. One important resource we did lack was rubber.

But BF Goodrich invented a synthetic rubber called Ameripol in 1940 which solved that problem.


Dec 12, 2017

What battles of World War II were fought over objectives of questionable strategic value?

Historians often cite The Battle of Stalingrad as being driven by both sides out of sheer vanity; because it was named for Stalin, Hitler wanted it conquered and Stalin wanted it defended at all costs.

This is a bit of an over-simplification, as Stalingrad was crucial to the Volga river, which was the supply pipeline of critical oil from Crimea.

However, some suspicion does legitimately linger that the ferocity and urgency of that battle was driven largely by ego.


Dec 12, 2017

A new software developer spent 4 days to make a simple HTML button and CSS, should I fire him?

I don’t know. But I can tell you this :

The fact that you’re asking Quora this, and the information you’ve omitted - what does the button do? What else was he doing those 4 days (setting up his Dev environment)? - points to a single conclusion.

You lack the expertise to make hire/fire decisions over technical people.

I’m not joking.


Dec 12, 2017

Why is e^x = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{ x^n}{n!}?

You may find this alternative explanation satisfying.

e has the magical property that e^x is an identity function under differentiation. That is, the derivative of e^x is e^x . For every point on the e^x curve, the y-value also happens to be the slope. e alone has this property, which makes it interesting and useful in calculus.

With this in mind, consider the infinite sum :

f(x) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}

Take the derivative with respect to x. Watch we don’t stumble over the first term where n=0 - that’s a special case where the value is 1 and the derivative 0 at every x.

Since it’s zero, we can omit that term and start at n=1

f'(x) = ( \sum_{n=\boxed{1}}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!} ) '

Now watch this. Take the derivative of each term within the series :

= \sum_{n=1}^\infty n \frac{x^{n-1}}{n!}

= \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{x^{n-1}}{(n-1)!}

Oh, cool. We took a step forward, but those n-1 terms suggest we take that step back :

= \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}

= e^x.

So we can see why e^x is indestructible when differentiated. The infinite series above, when you take the derivative, jumps to the left, then back to the right.

And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. — TS Eliot

Dec 13, 2017

What is the extra 4 numbers for 00982?

That looks like a “zip code” used for mailing in the US. 00982 is northern Puerto Rico.

Zip codes now use a “zip +4” format, which helps mail get there quicker. You can leave out the extra 4 digits and it’ll still get there, but it’s always best to include it so it looks like this :

00982–1234


Dec 13, 2017

What's the remainder of 13 factorial divided by 2017?

This is easy to compute, just start calculating 13! : 1x2x3 … 13. When the product gets larger than 2017, replace it with the product (mod 2017) and continue like that.


Dec 13, 2017

Why is James Cameron's 'Avatar' so hated?

The movie is technically groundbreaking and so visually spectacular it feels like your eyeballs might implode.

In his arrogance, though, Cameron wrote the script. The script is awful - just a painfully cliched “noble savage” trope. The dialog is wince-inducing.

And Sigourney Weaver, struggling with the tired role - straight out of central casting - of “tough assed cynical soldier” - who wakes from suspended animation demanding a cigarette - can’t do anything with the lines she’s been fed. You don’t see whatever character she’s supposed to be. You see Sigourney Weaver reading lines from a bad script.

Cameron is a genius with a camera and a computer. The man should never, however, touch a pen.

So Avatar is hated for what it might have been, had Cameron only checked his vanity and brought in good writers.


Dec 13, 2017

What it takes to become great from good?

Humility, talent, luck, effort and time.


Dec 14, 2017

If Bitcoin's main problems are speed and cost of transactions, how can it continue to be the dominant coin as popularity and demand grow? Can its codebase be changed?

That’s a problem. Yes, its code-base can be changed, but only with the approval of 51 % of the miners (and a whole bunch of other stuff.)

This is called a Hard Fork, and it’s difficult to pull off. While a hard fork may be the best thing in the long term, many stake holders have short-term interests in mind and don’t want it.

In fact, such a Hard Fork was attempted just this November (2017), SegWit2x backers cancel plans for bitcoin hard fork. The idea was to increase the block size so that transactions were faster and cheaper. After much internal conflict it had to be cancelled.

This led to an upsurge in the Alt-coin Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is very similar to what Bitcoin would have looked like after the fork.

Which brings up the larger point. The alt-coins are nothing to sneeze at. Bitcoin holds just over half the value of the total cryptocurrency market. Today’s percentage (Dec 14 2017) is 54%. That should drop to under 50% soon.

If Bitcoin fails to get the necessary consensus to implement improvements, the market can go elsewhere to coins like BCH, Monero, etc. that feature those improvements.

So if the market really wants certain features (like speed and low fees), badly enough to vote with its money - those alt-coins will surge in value and Bitcoin will drop.

By fork or free-market - demand will prevail.


Dec 14, 2017

Are C programmers people who, upon being told not to run with a knife, say it should be "Don't run with a knife and trip, and I don't trip"?

Not really. When told, “Don’t run with a knife”, a C programmer says -

“Except when you need to get a knife somewhere as fast as possible. Then sheath the knife, put it in your backpack, and run like hell. And beware all the knife-wielding idiots who skipped these precautions.”


Dec 14, 2017

What's the remainder of 12^(13^14) divided by 15?

I’ve added the topic Fermat’s Little Theorem. So many questions on Quora about remainders and exponents can be solved with it.

I’ll leave you with that hint.


Dec 16, 2017

How can I calculate the nth root of a number in C++?

the n’th root of x is given by

include <cmath>

pow(x,1.0/n);

Make sure to say ‘1.0’ and not just 1; in case n is an integer the 1.0 will alert the compiler it needs to be converted to a float. (Otherwise 1/5 gets rounded down to 0.)


Dec 19, 2017

Do you run Ubuntu 17.10 and why (not)?

Edit : 12/21/2017 : As if on cue, 17.10 exploded all over the place and Canonical had to recall it. The bug is so bad it can actually permanently brick some hardware. Canonical temporarily disables Ubuntu 17.10 download

No, I always use an OS that’s at least a few years old. I use Ubuntu 14.10, released in 2014.

Not because Ubuntu 14.10 is better - I’m sure 17.10 is faster and more secure.

But I do a lot of different stuff. I virtualize Windows, I plug in all sorts of strange devices, use an exotic network manager, do parallel processing on GPUs.

Those features have been worked out by the larger community that supports Ubuntu. Over the course of 3 years that support has been discussed, refined, and thoroughly documented.

If I update to 17.10, I’m sure at least two of my favorite functionalities will break. I won’t find answers online, nor updates, nor patches.

The OS is just the center of a broad community, and communities don’t have release dates. They need time to form, to solve problems, to improve those solutions, until you reach a point where just about everything you want to do Just Works.

An older OS with 3 community-years is vastly more effective than the latest OS -no matter how fast and secure. The release date marks the day the OS-developers have finished - but the community has just begun.


Dec 21, 2017

What are some skills you learnt or skills you honed this year?

I learned how to :

Feed a venus flytrap. Turns out you can’t just stuff a piece of cheese-burger in there.

How to mine various cryptocurrencies. Turns out this is by no means straightforward.

How to use a thing called OpenCL to make Massively Parallel Processors out of graphics cards. I’m using this for Machine Learning type stuff.


Dec 21, 2017

I smoked for the first time in my life, I'm underage, all my friends do it and now I'm afraid I'm going to die. Is one cigarette really that bad?

Nope. You’re fine.

It’s the next one that can kill you.


Dec 22, 2017

What movie cliché do you hate the most?

“Ah, Mr. Bond. Now I shall place you into my complex death machine that doesn’t work.”


Dec 22, 2017

Why do programmers need to take so much time for setup (which often doesn’t work) and can’t spend time on coding? How can one prevent this?

I’m not sure what you mean by “setup”, but I don’t think it matters.

Writing code is just a part of development. A developer also selects tools - whole stacks of software including programming environments, databases, web servers, version control, all of which need to be melded together - in both development and production versions, and so on and so on.

The idea is to reduce to a bare minimum the amount of code they write. The adage, “If you want fewer problems, write less code” prevails.

You don’t judge a doctor by the number of invasive procedures he performs on patients. You judge a doctor by their patients’ health.


Dec 22, 2017

How do I fetch every single line, one-by-one from a text file in Python?

Most ‘pythonic’ is this, which won’t flood memory if the file is large, etc :

with open('filename.txt') as fp:

for line in fp:

print line


Dec 22, 2017

Were references to alcoholism or alcohol abuse ever made in Roman writings? I assume some disapproval of indulgence as always, but were there any references to addiction?

The Romans generally praised wine but did have a few things to say about over-indulgence.

Absentem laedit cum ebrio qui litigat” — “To quarrel with a drunk is to wrong a man who is not even there.”


Dec 22, 2017

What is Ubuntu? What does it do?

Ubuntu is an alternative operating system to Windows. Here are some perks :

Free. No need to acquire a license or anything. No pestering you about “unregistered version.”

Can install itself alongside Windows, so you don’t have to commit to it right away.

Huge catalog of free software, all in one place for you to choose from.

Virtually virus-free, most Ubuntu users never need to bother with a virus scanner. The open source nature of Ubuntu makes vulnerabilities easy for others to spot and correct before black hats can make viruses.

Most web servers are in Linux (the larger family to which Ubuntu belongs.) So by using Ubuntu you are learning how to work with a web server.

Works better on low-end hardware. Nothing brings an 8 year old laptop back to life like Ubuntu. You only need about 8 G of space for the whole thing.

Batteries included. It comes with a LibreOffice suite already installed, which is a (mostly) compatible clone of Windows Office. Word Processor, spreadsheets, etc.

Devoted community that jumps all over your problem like no tech support department could possibly dream to.

Here are some drawbacks :

Not for gamers. Stuff like World of Warcraft won’t run on it.

Occasionally Canonical goofs and ships a bad release Ubuntu 17.10 PULLED: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered . Stick to the last LTS (Long Term Supported).

If you start installing weird stuff, sooner or later you’ll have to use the dreaded Unix Command Line. (But there’s lots of community support for that.)


Dec 22, 2017

Is Ubuntu worth dual-booting? How easy is it to switch back and forth between Windows and Ubuntu?

Yes - I do this all the time. You occasionally run into windows apps (especially games) that you’d like to try, and you want to be able to test the Ubuntu waters a bit before you make the jump.

The ‘bootloader’ that Ubuntu installs for Dual Boot makes it dead easy to switch back-and-forth. When you boot up, the first thing you are presented with is a menu asking which OS you want to fire up.

And it makes an interesting human experiment. I had dual boot for ages, and over time I booted into Windows less and less. Especially when Netflix started supporting Ubuntu.

Finally I realized I hadn’t booted into Windows for months. It had gone extinct by natural preference. (Windows is terribly laggy compared to Ubuntu, you can really feel it.)

Some client work did come up that required Windows - but I just virtualized it under Ubuntu using VirtualBox. Funny thing is - Windows runs better in a virtual machine than it does natively; Ubuntu keeps it “caged” so it doesn’t soak up all your memory and CPU.

Pro-tip : When you want VirtualBox’d windows to be snappy, set the process priority to Very High using gnome-system-monitor.


Dec 22, 2017

How did Anthony Hopkins avoid blinking his eyes in the close-up shots in Silence of the Lambs?

Not blinking is easier than you might think. The trick is to :

Don’t change what you’re looking at. Your eyes are smart and blink when your eyes are moving from one object to another - clever multitasking.

Distract yourself. Thinking about not blinking makes you blink.

So, stare at any object and recite the alphabet. Not so bad, was it ?


Dec 22, 2017

What sounds extremely wrong, but is actually correct?

A spoonful of activated carbon …

… has the surface area of a soccer field.

(This is measured by the rate at which activated carbon can adsorb things like chlorine in your tap water. A spoonful of activated carbon adsorbs as quickly as a flat carbon crystal surface the size of a soccer/football field.)


Dec 23, 2017

What was the scariest thing for a German soldier to see during WW2?

A Dachau prisoner.

When Dachau was liberated by the Americans, the SS fought as long as they could, inflicting heavy American casualties. Upon entering the camp, the Americans discovered mountains of bodies and other evidence of atrocities.

For many of the SS officers, the Americans didn’t arrest them. They were simply relieved of their weapons and were free to go. One small hitch: They had to walk, unarmed, past the former prisoners in order to reach the gates of the camp.

The SS man above has mere minutes to live before being killed with a shovel.

In the comments, Glenn Reges made the excellent point that this photo is claimed to be from Buchenwald, not Dachau. Many sources, including The Atlantic (World War II: The Holocaust ) make this claim. I propose that these reports are in error due to the fact : Buchenwald had already been taken over by inmates who armed themselves and stormed the guard towers by the time the Americans arrived. The building in the background (see the peculiar windows) matches the SS Command center at Dachau :


Dec 23, 2017

How do I know if a girl is jailbait if I want to talk to her?

“What school do you go to?” is one deft way to make this inquiry.


Dec 25, 2017

Why is it that I cannot install the new Firefox browser on Linux Mint? When I run the .sh file, it doesn't do anything.

Until I saw this question, I wasn’t aware Firefox had done such a major recent upgrade. Mozilla says it’s fast.

I installed it.

It’s fast.

It’s really, really fast.

I recorded the steps I used to install it, this should work on Mint and any other Ubuntu based system.

Note : This is an early release, so Mozilla warns that it may have security holes, etc, yada. The timid should tread no further.

Open a terminal (on Mint, that’s Menu/Terminal.)

Enter these lines, one at a time :

sudo apt-get remove firefox
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cargo firefox adobe-flashplugin llvm rustc ubufox

Dec 26, 2017

During WWII, what was the most dangerous and feared U.S. weapon?

At the risk of stating the obvious, that would be the atomic bomb.


Dec 26, 2017

What is the worst career advice you've ever received? Why?

“That’s just the way it is. Some things never change.”

1990 : “The cold war has been going on for 40 years. It’ll go on another 40. Just the way it is.”

1991 : “Businesses use FORTRAN and COBOL. That’s just the way it is. If you want a job …’

1995 : “Nobody is going to enter their credit card information into a web browser. Just the way it is.”

2000 : “Nobody is going to use their real names online. Just the way - “

2001 : “Mobile web browsers are prohibitively expensive to make, and the cell network can never support the bandwidth. Just the - “

2006 : “Serious smartphone users need a keyboard for email. Just - “

2007 : “Real estate doesn’t drop in value. Ju - “

2011 : “Nokia makes virtually all the world’s mobile phones. J - “

2016 : “Cryptocurrency is a cool science project, but in the end it’s governments that print money.”

That last one, is still “just the way it is” to a lot of folks.

In time, nothing is the way it is.


Dec 26, 2017

Is bitcoin cash worth having?

A very deep question.

When I first read Satoshi’s paper, I had to think about it for 2 days straight. About the algorithm and the nature of money. When I finally “got it”, it was quite an epiphany.

To answer this question, let me come at it sideways. I’ll pose another question : Why is gold valuable?

Well - we’re told - it’s beautiful. Just look at it. People adorn their bodies with it. It also has endless industrial uses. It never corrodes. Gold is forever.

There’s a problem with this explanation. A big, heavily guarded problem. This is Fort Knox :

There is $260 Billion worth of gold in there. Coincidentally, that’s about the same as Bitcoin’s market capitalization.

Conspiracy nuts will sometimes claim that all the gold has been pilfered by the Illuminati. In 1977, Fort Knox opened its vaults for the cameras - “still here, guys!” In 2016 they did that again.

Aside from these two occasions, nobody can go open the vaults and see the gold (except on security camera.)

So. We have this metal - prized for its beauty. But no human eyes look upon it.

And for its industrial applications. Yet we build nothing with it.

It becomes clear that we prize gold - and always have - for entirely different reasons.

There’s a fixed supply. It costs more money to find gold, than it does to buy gold. Unless of course you make a huge investment in a gold mine; but here you have a chance at both profit and loss.

It’s easy to transport. A little gold represents a significant enough portion of the world’s supply that $5,000 worth fits easily in your pocket.

It’s completely “fungible” - if it’s in your hand - whether you earned it, stole it, or mined it - you can go spend it. ˟

It’s durable. You can bury some in the wilderness and leave a map for your grand-kids to find it. It stores value.

It is impervious to politics. The government could fall into collapse or communism and - so long as you can hide it - you can still spend it around the world.

People began accepting it as payment at some point in history. This caused more people to accept it - since it could always be sold to the original group. This created a self-reinforcing cycle which rapidly led to gold being valued universally (even though it’s not accepted as payment for most simple purchases.)

It’s not about beauty or industrial applications. It’s those 6 qualities.

Bitcoin has them all (well - #4 remains to be seen.) Once we understand why we lock up gold and never look at it, we understand Bitcoin.

In another post here, I try to come at this question another way - Do you really know what a Bitcoin is and could you explain in detail to someone else?

˟ As Ionut Serban points out in the comments, Bitcoin per se is not completely fungible. But Monero and some other alt-coins are. These coins are the object of my biggest enthusiasm.

Dec 26, 2017

What is a problem that if solved, or a thing that if invented, would completely change the world?

I think that if there were a way for people from wealthy nations to directly give a small amount of money to a person in an impoverished nation, in such a way that they could see the actual person and the person would receive it immediately - that would have a profound impact.

Crytpocurrencies may be instrumental in bringing this about.


Dec 26, 2017

What is currently the best cryptocurrency to mine with the GTX 1080 ti?

Monero, by far, will give you the best results.

The algorithm Monero rests on, Cryptnight, is ASIC-proof (so far). This is due to deliberate bottlenecks in the algorithm that resist that sort of thing.

While massive Monero mining farms do exist, they are composed of ordinary GPUs like yours, so it’s a level playing field.


Dec 27, 2017

Why has Quora made it possible to ask new questions without logging into Quora?

It’s been awful in my opinion, and in the opinion of many users I know.

It’s my guess that Quora will back this feature out.

For now, I wrote a plugin that allows you to manage anonymous questions in your feed (hightlight them, or block them.)

Welcome to The Qure


Dec 27, 2017

Can e-cigarettes help me quit smoking?

They were instrumental in my quitting.

I smoked for over 30 years - tried the patch, zyban, everything.

When I took up vaping, it was only because I worked high up in a building and going outside to smoke was such a hassle.

As time went by, I noticed that I no longer cared where my cigarettes were, but rather kept track of my e-cig very precisely.

The time came when I looked at my cigarette pack, and it was 3 weeks old and they had gone stale. I tossed them and that was it.

I had quit … unintentionally.


Dec 27, 2017

Is Firefox quantum the kiss of death for Mozilla?

It’s the kiss of death for Chrome . I disagree with Tim Ventura here.

Some things just need to be pretty good. A search engine. A social network. We really don’t go shopping around for new ones because they get the job done.

But browser speed is a pain point, daily, for almost everyone. If people think there’s a chance another browser is more responsive, they’ll try it. If it’s noticeably better, they’ll switch.

And Firefox Quantum is very palpably faster. When you use it, and go back to Chrome, the extra pauses are irritating.

I’m with Wired on this one. If Chrome doesn’t catch up fast, FF Quantum is nothing short of a Chromium Mass Extinction Event (CMEE).

Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is The Browser Built for 2017


Dec 27, 2017

What do you think of Firefox Quantum?

It delivers a qualitatively superior experience due to its speed.

The web feels lighter.

Chrome’s got a major problem on their hands.


Dec 27, 2017

Is it possible that future mathematical breakthroughs could undo or change current assumptions about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?

Sure - Bitcoin is essentially a $260B bounty on cracking SHA-256 - Bitcoin Wiki . If anyone can crack this algorithm, they can hijack the blockchain and transfer all balances to their account.


Dec 28, 2017

What is your reaction to Craig Good leaving Quora?

I generally take a dim view of rage-quitting to protest changes, but Craig’s departure isn’t your usual, “Screw you guys, I’m going home!” fit of pique.

He was a respected and solid long-time contributor with no reputation for being thin-skinned.

To shrug off his departure as business-as-usual is akin to a coal miner saying, “Canaries die all the time. No biggie.”


Dec 28, 2017

Why are tabs better than spaces in programming?

Neither are terribly important as long as you’re consistent.

In my experience, indents of 2 spaces are the unofficial standard.

The problem with tabs is there is potential for confusion about character position, where the nth character isn’t displayed in the nth column due to >1 width of tabs. This is rarely an actual problem, but rather a small consideration that breaks the tie.


Dec 28, 2017

What would happen if Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler both were at the Nuremberg Trials?

It is possible that Göring may have gotten off without a death sentence. Himmler was certainly the architect of the extermination campaign against Jews and other groups under Hitler’s authority. Both of course had the sense the kill themselves when defeat was at hand.

Which left Göring as the highest ranking Nazi.

The Americans had a psychologist in constant discussions with the accused, American Military Chief Psychologist Gustave Gilbert. Gilbert recorded that Göring recoiled in genuine horror and disbelief when shown pictures and films of the death camps. As head of the Luftwaffe (air force) it makes operational sense that Göring was not informed of the camps for the simple reason that he had no need to know.

At first, Göring insisted that Hitler couldn’t have known - that it was all Himmler’s doing. As the Nuremberg Trials progressed, Göring came to accept that Hitler knew full well and almost certainly ordered them directly.

Gilbert recorded that Göring said to him in private, “You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more. When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial it won't be necessary to condemn him. He has condemned himself.”

Now, I’m no Göring fan. He was an antisemite, and guilty of waging a war of aggression throughout Europe. The sentence imposed on Albert Speer - who was using slave labor from the camps - of 20 years would have perhaps been imposed on Göring - if only Himmler had been present to hang for his deeds : The true crime against humanity that was the death camps.

Goering: The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader - Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel Amazon.com: Goering: The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader (9781616081096): Roger Manvell, Heinrich Fraenkel: Books


Dec 29, 2017

How do I get things done? I find it impossible to sit down and start studying, to organize myself for months since I moved. Why do I find it so difficult to complete anything at work and at home and how can I fix this problem?

I’m not sure, but it certainly sounds like my experience with ADHD.

A psychiatrist sees this kind of thing all day long, I’d suggest an appointment with one.

Here’s some information Diagnosis of ADHD using DSM-5TM | ADHD Institute.

The good news is it’s highly treatable.


Dec 29, 2017

What is a cheap Monero Rig under $200?

I got you. I built one recently. Check it out :

Used HP XW4400 workstation -

HP Workstation XW4400 Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM 160GB HARD Drive Windows 7 | eBay - $70 including shipping (US)

This thing has two PCIe slots so is good for Monero mining.

AMD Radeon HD 6950 MSI 2GB GDDR5 Great Condition

This card delivers a Monero hashrate of 360 H/s. $48 with shipping - (it’ll take 10 days from China but maybe you can find one closer.) Careful to get the 2 GB version, it matters for hashrate.

You’re going to get two of them, so our total is now $170.00

You’ll need a spare power supply for that second card - LOGISYS Computer PS480D2 480W ATX12V Power Supply | eBay for $18. That brings us to $188. (Note - use a paper clip in place of an on-switch for that supply, you can google that hack.)

Almost done, you’ll need a simple, old fashioned pci card for your monitor, since you’ll be mining with the other two graphics cards.

TVGA96PCI Trident SVGA / VGA Graphics / Video PCI Adapter / Card (TVGA96) / TV57 | eBay for 17 bucks.

Finally, you’ll need two of these to feed power to your graphics cards,

https://www.ebay.com/itm/IDE-Molex-Dual-4-Pin-to-1-x-6P-PCI-E-Express-Splitter-Power-Adapter-Cable-Cord for 4 bucks each.

So - our total comes to $223. Your total Monero hashrate will be 720 H/s. This generates $55 / month, at current difficulty, not counting power cost.

We came in just over budget by $23.

It’ll look a lot like this :

I recommend using the Claymore miner for windows.

Hit me up if you have questions.


Dec 30, 2017

Currently, who are the best right wing philosophers/thinkers? I’m a leftist, and I believe that it’s important to challenge the beliefs you hold, so I’m mostly looking for authors/public speakers that’ll give me something worthwhile to engage with.

It’s a strange world where she qualifies as Right Wing, but here we are.

Christina Hoff Sommers, aka “The factual feminist”, or simply “based mom” from gamer-gate is, first of all, a philosopher with a PhD from Brandeis. She gives lectures at packed college auditoriums - lately with armed guards to protect her. Her deeply informed, scholarly perspective seeks to gently coax feminists back to the work of equality, not “justice”.

Another is Hoff-Summer’s friend Camille Paglia. Camille Paglia defies description - she is a brilliant and prolific polymath whom even the most gifted minds find intellectually overwhelming. If you take her in small doses, however, and take time to digest, she has much to teach along with a blistering indictment of the third wave and identity politics.

(Do not ever, ever, ever debate Camille Paglia. Her brain is a weapon of mass destruction.)

And I’ll get in trouble for this, but I’ve got to give a shout-out to Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo is probably the most dangerous threat to the New Left; being a gay Jew married to a black man, he was difficult to target with the usual ad hominen tactics of identity politics. Yes - he has said things about Muslims that were probably better left unsaid. But he has an incredibly quick and incisive wit, holds nothing back at all, and is both funny and fun.

But trust me on the Paglia thing. Not even once.


Dec 30, 2017

How can I protect the source code of a Python app?

Compile it! The compiler is probably already installed with your interpreter, it’s called pyinstaller .

Welcome to PyInstaller official website

(It’s called installer because it is good about statically linking any dependencies so your executable can be distributed without a lot of headaches.)

Your code does remain in a mangled up form as .pyc, a sort of intermediate byte-code that is anything but readable.

If you want to take things further, you can look into Cython to compile directly to executable binaries. (Cython is more than that though, and is worthy of your attention in its own right as a superset of Python with C datatypes. It’s often used to optimize performance bottlenecks in Python or link with C libraries.)


Dec 30, 2017

After I become a good programmer in Python, what would be a good language to learn next?

I agree with others on practical grounds - you should learn a new language “on demand” - we learn by both doing - and needing to do.

Well, I don’t agree but see what where they’re coming from. An experienced developer follows a “need to know” education policy to avoid wasting time requiring a skill we don’t use.

However, if you are new to programming, or are a student, or just someone with alot of spare time, learning one or two different languages gives you a deeper understanding of programming.

If you choose the right ones - they should be languages of another genre, and a good example of that genre.

Python - also my favorite language, is a hybrid of object oriented, functional and declarative.

It’s good to play with Lisp or Scheme to see what a pure functional language is about.

And then with Smalltalk to see what a pure object oriented language looks like.

And perhaps C++ to see what a non interpreted, low-level language is like.

You don’t have to get proficient with them, but giving them some serious playtime is like learning Ancient Greek or Latin. You may never use them but they give you a high vantage point from which to survey the different languages out.

Your question of “Which language should I learn next” - is a big one, not a small one - in the sense that you’ll have to re-ask it continually. A good overflight of the languages will inform this decision all along the way.


Dec 31, 2017

How can evolution produce beauty?

As a personal aside to other, more substantive answers, life was beautiful from its inception :

I mean : look at that. DNA carries information, it creates new versions of itself - it never dies.

Beautiful in both form and function, I’ve never seen something so suggestive of the hand of God.


Dec 31, 2017

If you were sent to 1944 and were Hitler’s right hand man, what would you do?

Shoot him, Himmler and Goebels and conspire with Göring and Speers to declare the SS criminals subject to Gestapo arrest, and immediately appeal to the Allies for peace under less punishing terms.

I mean, I doubt I would survive any of that, but it seems as good a plan as any.


Dec 31, 2017

Who was the best potential U.S. President who was never elected?

Bobby Kennedy would have pulled us out of Vietnam sooner and possibly dismantled the CIA - as well as allowing America to pass on the Nixon era.


Dec 31, 2017

What constitutes racism?

I submit that, to deliberately disregard the New Left’s “words mean what we say they mean” newspeak, it’s not a matter of opinion.

Racism is the belief that some races are inherently superior to others.

As a belief, it can only belong to a person. A system cannot be racist - “systemic racism” is a contradiction in terms. A system can be oppressive, but not racist.

As a belief, it can belong to a person of any race. It does not require power.

The word “superior” can be taken to mean many things, as long as it’s substantive. Obviously African people have superior resistance to skin cancer, for example. Most people wouldn’t take that as ‘substantive’.

Note also - that moral superiority is quite substantive. So - as just an insane example I made up just now - if you believe that past and present injustices have instilled your race with a moral perspective beyond the grasp of another race - that is quite substantive and that belief is openly racist.

The typically invoked rebuttal that “white men wrote the dictionary!” is absurd; the dictionary is filled with other words like “oppression, discrimination, prejudice” and so forth that would work perfectly well. The reason that they try to appropriate the word ‘racist’ is precisely because a racist person evokes a visceral reaction of contempt. A racist person has made a deliberate choice to believe as he does, his beliefs are abhorrent to us, we have trouble forgiving him. The new left wants the contempt that comes with the word, but not the meaning.

Torches and pitchforks are available in the lobby.


Dec 31, 2017

What if you are not a smoker and you decided to tried the nicotine patch for 30 - 40 days as directed? Would you be addicted to nicotine at the end of the trial?

Yes, I was. Although, typically you ‘step down’ at day thirty to a lower nicotine level.

While you’re still hooked, your blood hasn’t hit the peak plasma levels you get while smoking. So you’ve pulled your body a good way out of the addiction, though reducing the patch strength pulls you much farther.

Those 30–40 days on the patch - the primary purpose is to start working on the mental aspects of the addiction, without going through withdrawal.

Which brings me to the other point : A support group, or cognitive behavior based techniques (such as SMART Recovery) is helpful in making the changes to your thoughts and behaviors that you need to stay smoke free.


Jan 1, 2018

What was Japan’s long term plans when they bombed Pearl Harbor? Did they envision making the United States part of their empire?

Oh, not at all. That’s crazy talk.

Japan wanted a Pacific Empire, not much larger than what they occupied in 1941,

Most importantly, they wanted territory and industrial resources that would support an empire on a world footing with western empires like Great Britain.

Toward that end, they wanted the Western powers forced out of the region.

America’s Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor threatened to blockade Japan, decapitating the mainland and cutting off the spoils of conquest. Oil was the most particular choke-point. Japan now held oil producing territory in the Dutch East Indies, China, and elsewhere. But the fields had been damaged during the fighting, and it would be years before production was back up and tankers built to transport it.

Japan had a strategic reserve of perhaps two years worth. America had just cut off shipments of American oil. If Japan worked quickly, they could get those oil facilities working again and build tankers to import it just in the nick of time.

All of which would be futile if the Americans bombed their tankers.

If the Americans unleashed the Pacific Fleet, there would be sustained naval battles as Japanese oil dwindled steadily toward imperial collapse.

All those American ships, anchored in a neat little row - what if they could be taken out in a single bombing run? Not a long series of battles, but in an hour-long tactical master-stroke?

We’ll probably have to fight them anyway. We may as well win.

As Prime Minister Tojo said, “It is either glory or decline.”

I’m not saying that Pearl Harbor was a good idea. It’s just rather easy to imagine how it might have seemed like one at the time.


Jan 1, 2018

Do you know a Python helper/assistant/interface that can make coding way easier?

There’s lots of IDEs available, but I have recently come to love PyCharm. Built from the ground up for Python, free as in beer :

https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/


Jan 3, 2018

What is an easier way of writing "If list [7] or list [8] or list [9] in variable"? Could I write something like ‘if list [7:9] in variable’?

I take it from your syntax that this is Python.

The most “pythonic” (and computationally efficient, especially as the lists get large) way is to use the construct of set like so :

l1 = [2,4,6,8,10]

l2 = [1,2,3]

if len(set(l1).intersection(set(l2))) > 0 :

print (‘Found it!’)

So in your case, it would be

if len(set(l1).intersection(set(l2[7:9]))) > 0 :

By the way, never use the variable name list in Python, it’s a Reserved word - Wikipedia which has a special meaning. Accidentally using a reserved word can lead to really weird bugs.

Edit : Jonas Oberhauser offers this prettier form (as well as the correction that we have to slice [7:10] to get 7 to 9 inclusive) :

if set(l1) & set(l2[7:10]):

print (‘Found it!’)


Jan 3, 2018

What will Quora do with all these questions and answers? Are they secretly building an AI?

Don’t take the movie Ex Machina to heart.

You can no more build an AI from massive data than you can build a bird by hoarding millions of feathers.


Jan 4, 2018

Why has no one stopped bitcoin?

It is unstoppable by design.

Akin somewhat to the unstoppable peer-to-peer file share systems people use to steal movies, there is no central Bitcoin server to shut down. It exists among its nodes, but not in any one of them.

The incentive to mine has millions of people applying their computing power to lock down the blockchain. It’s more computing power than any government can muster; the blockchain can’t be cracked by a supercomputer.

It’s a hydra. Bitcoin is now no longer > 50 % of the altcoin markets, with competitors on its heels like Dash, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, etc.

The talk of government regulation of cryptocurrency is wishful thinking on the part of a financial system which is possibly approaching extinction in the face of an overpowering technology.

It’s unstoppable. That’s why people are buying it.


Jan 4, 2018

What would you do if your interviewer says "prove to me that you're smart"?

“Sorry, this must be the wrong room. I’m here for the job interview, not the Turing Test.”


Jan 5, 2018

Would the atomic bombs of WWII be properly regarded as "strategic" or "tactical"?

The atomic bomb was a rare unity of both tactical and strategic.

First - you have a goal, which is usually to make the other guy surrender.

Strategy comprises the broad ways you might achieve that goal : Attack their military, subvert their alliances, cut off their supplies, broadcast propaganda to their population.

Tactics comprise the specific ways those things are done - like we might cut off their supplies by striking a deal with neutral nations to raise the price of steel sharply.

The atomic bomb served strategic objectives : In a single flash it would demoralize and panic their population, present the Japanese with the imminent prospect of annihilation thus changing their stratagem, embolden their other enemies to attack, etc.

It was also the means by which those broad strategies were achieved.

The bomb was so destructive that it flattened the distinction between tactic and strategy.


Jan 5, 2018

Why are the 9/11 events considered a crime, but not the 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor?

The Japanese at least had the decency to use their own planes against a military target with their national insignia clearly emblazoned on the wings.


Jan 5, 2018

In a building, if there’s 1000 people on the first floor, 999 on the second floor and so on until floor 990, in which there are 10 people (then 9 on floor 991 etc.), all the way to floor 1000 with 1 person, how many people are in the building?

To rephrase the other answers a bit :

Consider two identical buildings, populated as you’ve stated.

Flip one building upside down. Now jam the two buildings together, knocking out the wall in between.

Now each floor has 1001 people. Total ’em up, and divide by 2.


Jan 5, 2018

Is the minimization of a function with n parameters NP-hard?

As Mark Gritter points out, NP-hard problems can always be expressed in terms of a minimizing function of n-parameters.

With some luck, you have a “well behaved” function of N real numbers. “Well behaved” means things like continuous, partially differentiable, easily computable, and whatever else I can’t think of right now. In such cases you can use the Drop and Roll method - pick points at random, and move in the direction of greatest decrease of the function (Stochastic Gradient Descent).

Far from NP-hard, these give solutions pretty quickly.


Jan 5, 2018

In the Godfather 2, did Fredo show his frustration when he realized Michael had survived the attempt on his life?

I think, as he protested, “I didn’t know it was gonna be a hit, Michael!”

We see Fredo lying in bed after the assassination attempt, and he gets a phone call from Johnny Ola. Fredo cries, “You guys lied to me!”


Jan 6, 2018

What are good tips manually converting the Python code to C++ for speed?

Don’t go overboard, at most 10% of your code is the bottleneck. Which brings me to find the bottleneck.

It’s never exactly where you think it is. You must profile your code. Do not fail to profile your code.

You just smirked and figured you could get away without profiling it just this once, didn’t you? Stop that.

Profile your code, damn you !

Here’s info on python profilers. 26.4. The Python Profilers Don’t let me find out you didn’t profile your code.

Now that you’ve profiled your damn code, you know where the performance bottlenecks are.

You have a couple of options. You can create a Python module in C++ that handles the time-consuming stuff. There’s a couple of ways to do it -

Python Programming/Extending with C++

You can look into BoostPython, that way is older and pretty simple. Boost.Python - 1.66.0

Another way is to use Cython, which extends Python with C-ish features so you can wrote C-like code in your Python. Most of the performance boost comes from static typing, something not normally a part of Python. But there’s other boosts as well. This is the easiest route if you want to just do line-by-line optimizations.

Cython can also be used simply as an easy way to link C++ modules to Python.

If your C++ code is computationally intensive, you may be able to do super-fast vectorized operations using a graphics card as a Massively Parallel Processor (MPP). The C++ Torch library can help with this, facebook/thpp. (There is a Python version of Torch, but you can’t optimize the way you can in C++-Torch.)


Jan 6, 2018

Is it safe to invest in Bitcoin or is it just a bubble?

I don’t think it’s a bubble, but it’s definitely not “safe”. No investment this novel, increasing this quickly, is safe against sudden drops.

This should definitely be part of the high risk portion of your investments (how big that portion is depends on your age and other life factors.)


Jan 8, 2018

If a Jew had natural blonde hair and blue eyes, would they still be gassed in Nazi Germany? If so, how would they be recognized from regular ‘aryans’?

There were a number of ways Nazis identified Jews.

Some Jews did manage to secretly ‘pass’, but not many. The determination wasn’t made by glancing at the person, but by more methodical means :

Jewish men were circumcised. This gave away the parents, siblings, and children.

Birth and wedding certificates, on file in every German town, recorded the religion of people.

Strangely, in 1920 Germany stopped entering religion on birth certificates. So there was a 16 year gap by the time governmental persecution of Jews began in 1936, but it was easy to infer from the parent’s documentation which children were Jewish.

It was probably more difficult to assume the documented identity of a non-Jew than it was to escape Nazi Germany entirely.


Jan 9, 2018

What can I do to improve my salary? I was hired about 2 years ago as a software quality assurance analyst. I was fresh to the role, but now with my experience I see that I'm fairly underpaid compared to the local market. How can I negotiate for more?

This is really tricky and delicate. It is true that the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced.

You want to ask without signalling your desire to leave. When making your case, start off by expressing that you like your job, and have grown a lot professionally in it - you’ve learned alot, taken on new responsibility. That’s a good segue to the delicate topic that you’d like to be compensated at the standard rate for the work you do (make sure you can back this up with good data - from your local area.) Have a specific amount in mind, and also have a specific minimum in mind at which you’ll walk away satisfied (perhaps a bit grudgingly).

A great life-hack for any negotiation is to think through various contingencies ahead of time. Don’t make any decisions during the meeting if you can help it. Rather, try to anticipate all possible outcomes and ‘precompute’ your response to them ahead of time.

For example, what if your boss agrees you deserve a raise, but says the budget just has no room for it - that they themselves haven’t gotten a raise in 2 years. Would you accept an extra week’s vacation? Some other form of compensation?

What about time - “we can’t think about it the next two quarters, but in six months …”? What would you think of this? Would you want to lock down the amount of the pay raise, and leave the timing open for consideration? Or just an offer to rediscuss?

Like that. The idea is you aren’t caught off-guard by a scenario you’ve given no thought to.

Finally, it’s always best to negotiate from a position of power. It never hurts to go on a few discrete interviews and perhaps drum up an offer for more money.

Not that you want to mention that. Unless you have to. If your boss pushes back and says yes, but you screwed this up and that up and called in sick a lot. That’s a worst-case scenario where they are claiming you’re not worth it. Having proof to the contrary shuts that down.


Jan 9, 2018

What if meditation is just hokum?

It’s hard to accuse meditation of being some kind of a swindle, because it’s not making any crazy claims.

No payoff in the afterlife, you won’t be able to levitate, speak to the dead, or defeat the evil Galactic Lord Xenu.

Meditation teaches only that by becoming still, you will learn to be still.

That by quieting your mind, your mind will become quiet.

That by controlling your breath your breathing will be under your control.

That by not seeking, you will become content.

The practice of meditation doesn’t want you to sign anything, show up anywhere or recruit other people. It doesn’t want your donation.

It offers nothing more than what it is.

If you’re looking for something to bash as a scam, the practice of meditation is going to be a very, very frustrating target.


Jan 10, 2018

Why is there so much hatred towards Microsoft these days?

There’s a lot to why so many people hate Microsoft. Much of it goes back decades, some of it is more recent. And, of course, MS still has its fans - but the question asks about the haters, so I’ll avoid the debate and just try to lay it out.

They used their OS dominance to crush start-ups. All they had to do was ‘pre-announce’ some effort in some area and poof - no investor would touch a startup in that area. And they ‘pre-announced’ a lot. They did other more directly sleazy things like using Due Diligence as a cover to steal technology Microsoft Loses Case On Patent, and using their OS dominance to bury the price of Explorer, driving Netscape out of business. Their list of dirty tricks is endless and landed them in court with the Justice Department and 20 different States. U.S., states sue Microsoft for antitrust

They kept certain Operating System API calls secret. There were certain functions which made things faster or better and Microsoft kept that information to themselves. Not only did this put independent software makers at a disadvantage, it raised the spectre of security holes using API calls nobody knew existed.

Their PR had the surreal and creepy faux-optimism of North Korean television. Even in their technical documentation - there was no such thing as a known bug. They would be perfectly aware of a severe bug in, say, Visual Basic - but would tell nobody until they could patch it. So developers had to fall into the same hole over and over again. When the bug was finally fixed, they wouldn’t announce the fix. Because the bug itself was never acknowledged. This got so … fucking creepy … that whenever they rolled out a major new release of something, they would preface the documentation by saying how great the old version was - that this new one was just so much even awesomer. Microsoft was happy to waste man-centuries of customer’s time rather than simply say, “precompiled headers are broken in Visual C++, we’re working on it.” (Actual example.) Never “patches”. They were “Service packs.”

They made a sustained and concerted effort to break Open Standards. Even for HTML, their mantra was “Embrace and Extend”. Meaning - express enthusiasm for emerging standards. Then add our own special, non-standard little bits. The standard would thus begin to bifurcate. The in-joke at Microsoft was the last ‘E’ : “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.”

They were suspected of putting an NSA back-door into their encryption when the variable name “NSAKEY” was discovered in an inadvertently shipped debug build.

They threatened to sue Linux makers/users in 2007 for violation of no less than 235 of its patents.

Add to all this that their software was often bloated, crashy, and expensive. Let brew for a few decades and Microsoft emerges with a hard-earned reputation as litigious sleaze-bags who - possessing no confidence whatever that they can produce winning software - must crush competitors by any means possible.


Jan 12, 2018

How long do I have to wait to smoke after getting wisdom teeth pulled?

The danger is the suction you create on the cigarette can pull the blood clot out, you bleed like crazy and like D. Jones says develop dry socket which hurts like hell.

Same thing about sucking on straws.

So waiting 24–48 hours is advised. If you are going absolutely bat-shit, or even after the 24 hour period, a handy cheat is to be careful not to form a seal with your lips around the cigarette and draw very slowly.

You want to minimize the vacuum created within your mouth. Relax your cheeks and touch them with your other hand - if your cheeks pull inward, that’s a warning you’re creating a vacuum.

Also : Nicotine gum.


Jan 12, 2018

Why do I get a brown color on my tongue after smoking too many cigarettes?

When I smoked I used to get this. You’d think it’s just tar or something, but it’s not.

It’s …. Hairy Tongue!

For reals. Hairy tongue (lingua villosa) Black hairy tongue - Symptoms and causes can be black, brown, or yellow. It’s a buildup of dead skin cells on the bumps of your tongue. The cause is usually that the natural bacterial flora of your mouth has been thrown out of whack by either antibiotics or tobacco use.

Of itself, it’s harmless - you can brush it off with a toothbrush. It might be worth considering though - if that’s happening to your tongue … what the hell is happening to your lungs !?


Jan 12, 2018

Can I bring a vape on a Greyhound?

You can bring a fucking bazooka on a Greyhound. There’s no security.

You can even sneak drags from your vape, if you do so discreetly enough. I recommend a nicotine-salt rig like this, hold in the vapor for extra long, and exhale downward (and sit next to a friend or nobody).

https://www.myvaporstore.com/Aspire-Breeze-Starter-Kit-p/ap-bre10.htm


Jan 12, 2018

What is the exact meaning of "DRY special Type - I" property in Salem?

I’m sure I can answer if you give a little more context.


Jan 12, 2018

Was it really necessary to drop the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2?

A lot of Yes answers here. This is a controversial topic. I won’t take the opportunity to give my opinion, but rather offer up a single fact that is historically beyond dispute and leave to reader to delve further if they wish.

Japan never surrendered unconditionally. They accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. This document specifies the surrender of the Japanese Armed Forces. This language was carefully chosen by the Allies, because the Japanese had sent peace feelers specifying that the Emperor himself must not be treated as a military officer, and must not face trial or recriminations of any kind.

In Japan, the Emperor does not direct warfare, or meddle in any earthly matter of state. Yes, he must give his permission. But he doesn’t start wars. In Hirohito’s case, his grip on the government was tenuous as factions of the military were constantly plotting to assassinate him.

So the Potsdam Declaration, demanding unconditional surrender of the military - did that mean the Emperor or not?

If it does mean the Emperor, we can’t surrender. The Emperor is a God. We can’t surrender a God.

It it does not mean the Emperor, why don’t they say that - and why won’t they accept our previous offers of exactly that?

It’s really not clear at all what the hell this new conditional surrender of military-only means. Thus, we “kill it with silence”.

Is it possible this was a misunderstanding of language and culture?

When the Potsdam Declaration was accepted by the Japanese, Truman simply called it an “unconditional surrender” - and the papers and history books repeated it as such. But the Declaration clearly says “unconditional surrender of the armed forces.” That is a contradiction in terms, implied in the surrender of X is the condition that non-X is not surrendered. Not their homeland. Not any civilian.

Now, I oversimplify a bit. The Japanese also did not want to be occupied, while the Potsdam declaration imposes a temporary occupation, and there are other points of contention.

But one is left with the very disturbing sense that thousands of innocents were seared to death for lack of a few simple words. After all, the Allies never accused the Emperor of any crime and allowed him to retain his title.

It’s a fair question - why didn’t Truman simply say that ?


Jan 12, 2018

What do mathematicians think about Piper Harron's recent AMS article? Should white male professors with tenure resign from their positions?

Some have mentioned she may have been deliberately provocative, a piece of theatre for a political purpose. She takes pains to dispel that notion,

If you think this is a bad or un-serious idea, your sexism/racism/transphobia is showing.

So she means it.

The only tenure-track position she has succeeded in vacating is her own; no university can risk granting tenure to a professor who thinks white males should not hold faculty positions - because this raises the legitimate concern she won’t grade white male students fairly. Especially graduate students. To say nothing of reviewing her peers.

She’s radioactive.

(I’m no mathematician but I grew up on a college campus.)


Jan 14, 2018

What caused the ballistic missile false alarm in Hawaii?

Not to get all Tom Clancy, and this is based on no actual evidence, but imagine we were concerned about a hostile nuclear power like, I dunno, North Korea as a for-instance. And we’re not entirely certain as to the location of their weapons, their communications - and especially their attack readiness.

A false alarm to an isolated part of the US like Hawaii of an incoming missile would put North Korea on alert that a retaliatory strike may be imminent, either due to an error on our part or an attempt to feign a false-flag attack from NK.

This would light up everything NK has and yield a mountain of Intel. Or, NK might just sit there, all confused, doing nothing. Either way, we’ve learned a lot.

It would also give NK a chilling taste of the brink as they enter talks with South Korea and her allies.


Jan 14, 2018

Do mathematicians feel certain equations? Is there emotional math that has made mathematicians cry or feel exactly what the equation would result in?

Yes - and more than that.

Not only is there a intense feeling of awe at something which mathematicians call “elegance”, such as Euler’s Identity, Galois Theory or Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but it is beauty that lights the way.

Mathematicians look for the beauty hidden in the apparently inscrutable intricacy of mathematics; the most elegant path almost always leads to the answer you seek.

Philosophers are left to puzzle over why this is so; is it an artifact of our own way of thinking and feeling or is it something deeper? Nobody knows. But time and again we observe as Keats did,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — Ode on a Grecian Urn

Jan 15, 2018

How can I renew my belief that meditation works?

I think the problem is with outrageous claims, not with the practice of meditation. Claims like meditation helps with weight-loss or that it “may preserve the tips of our chromosomes” are inciting a well-deserved backlash from researchers.

This is from another answer, but for the first time ever I am pasting content from another answer because a question-merge wouldn’t be right. So from,

Christopher Reiss's answer to What if meditation is just hokum?

It’s hard to accuse meditation of being some kind of a swindle, because it’s not making any crazy claims. No payoff in the afterlife, you won’t be able to levitate, speak to the dead, or defeat the evil Galactic Lord Xenu.
Meditation teaches only that by becoming still, you will learn to be still.
That by quieting your mind, your mind will become quiet.
That by controlling your breath your breathing will become measured.
That by not seeking, you will become content.
The practice of meditation doesn’t want you to sign anything, show up anywhere or recruit other people. It doesn’t want your donation. It offers nothing more than what it is.

Jan 15, 2018

Is there anyway to open an executable file from an ISO DVD in Python?

Sure,

An ISO DVD should mount just like another hard drive, so you can find the full path to the executable on the DVD from a file explorer program.

Now you can execute it a number of ways, either synchronously (wait for the program to launch and finish) or asynchronously (launch it in a side process and don’t wait for it.)

Here’s a good overview of various ways,

Execute External Programs, the Python Ways.

A simple example of synchronous execution is this :

import os

print os.system('notepad.exe')


Jan 15, 2018

Why is there a sudden uptick in the popularity of low ohm mods (like Juul or Suorin) made for salt-nicotine based juice?

Juul claims that nicotine salt-solution is like “free-basing” nicotine, that it spikes serum nicotine levels to a much higher peak, more closely simulating the effect of smoking.

Juul did conduct some tests which support their claim, though they don’t meet the clinical standards legally required of a ‘medical’ claim like that.

In my experience (I use both salt- and regular e-juice), it’s true. With the salt solution you feel ‘finished’ for a while, while non-salt based liquids never complete sate the desire. I can chain-vape regular ejuice all day, with salt-based I’ve had enough after a few pulls.

If someone is trying to switch off cigarettes completely, a salt solution may get them to that goal more quickly.


Jan 17, 2018

Can you earn money by answering Quora questions?

I think I mooched like $10.00 from Sanjay Sabnani at the New York Meetup for cab fare.

So, at 2,500 answers that comes to 0.4 cents per answer.

Not too shabby, if I say so myself.


Jan 18, 2018

In Hitler's propaganda speech to the German youth where he says "to love peace" you must be "peace loving". Did he really want peace, or what do you think he actually meant? What is the message behind him mentioning peace?

This speech is perhaps Hitler’s most famous. It was given at Nuremberg to the Hitler Youth in 1934, and became part of the film Triump of the Will.

Hitler was a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. His speeches were carefully paced, endlessly rehearsed, and almost hypnotic in form and intent. Like music, the message is not in any one note or phrase, but emerges from the whole structure.

He uses the word peace twice , but let me highlight parts of the whole so the structure is more evident :

My German youth, after a year, I can greet you here again. You are here today in this place, a cross section of what is around us in the whole of Germany.
We know that you German boys and girls are taking on everything we hope for Germany.
We want to be one people, and you, my youth, are to be this people. We want to see no more class divisions: you must not let this grow up amongst you.
We want to see one nation one day, and you must train for it.
We want our people to be obedient, and you must practice obedience.
We want our people to love peace, but also to be brave. You must be peace-loving and so you must be peace-loving and courageous at the same time.
We want our people to remain strong. It will be hard, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth. You must learn to suffer privation without crumbling once.
Whatever we create today, whatever we do, we will die, but Germanywill live on in you. When there is nothing left of us, then you must hold in your fists the flags that we hoisted out of nothing. I know this cannot be otherwise because you are the flesh of our flesh, and the blood of our blood. In your young heads burns the same spirit that rules us. You cannot be other than united with us. When the great columns of our movement march triumphantly through
Germany today, I know you will join the columns. We know before us Germany lies, in us Germany marches, and behind us Germany follows.

And, just as you can’t appreciate music by reading the sheet music, you can only understand Hitler’s speeches by listening to them. Especially in the context of the media they were wrapped in.

This film clip is a 10 minute excerpt of Triumph of the Will - which is such a masterful work by its ground-breaking director Leni Riefenstah that even the French gave it an award. It’s still considered among the best propaganda films ever made. It’s worth 10 minutes of your time, I promise. It ends with the speech you ask about.

At the end, Hitler doesn’t wait to acknowledge the cheers. He abruptly walks off, as if to signal the primacy of action over ideas.

To understand Hitler, you’ve got to zoom out like this. His mention of the word ‘peace’, twice, comprises only two thin notes of an ecstatic symphony of aggression.


Jan 19, 2018

Consider a clock (A) travelling near to the light speed relative to another clock (B). When they are synchronised, which one will show a later time considering that each one is stationary in their own frame of reference, and the other was moving?

Here’s the thing: Since space and time are bound up together into space-time, you can’t speak meaningfully of comparing two clocks at some distance apart.

So - let’s add the stipulation that the clocks have to end up back where they started, right next to each other. One or both of them has made a round trip.

Keep one clock still and let another take a round-trip at close to the speed of light. From each clock’s point of view - it’s the other clock that took that the round trip.

But at the end of the trip, the clocks won’t be the same. The clock which accelerated will be behind the other one.

To make things easier to talk about, let’s say we’ve got a person holding each clock. The two people don’t have a symmetrical experience because, even if we blindfold them, the one who accelerated can feel the acceleration. He knows he sped up and slowed back down. He knows this without reference to any other body but his own.

We say the stationary person has an inertial frame of reference. This is called the Twin ‘Paradox’; it’s accounted for the the Theory of Special Relativity.

In short, the one who feels the acceleration/deceleration has read Einstein and expects the stationary watch to be ahead of his own when he returns. The second person felt nothing but saw the other guy wiz away, so also expects his clock to be ahead.


Jan 19, 2018

Have you ever been in the presence of a celebrity but didn't know who they were at the time?

Yea - some years back I was at a seaside bar named Captain Carlos.

Not a fancy place, a kind of raucus, fun place with good food and bands playing outdoors by the ocean.

I went up to the bar to order a drink. The bartender was busy so I had to wait a while. Finally she turned to me and said, “What can I getcha?”

It was Whoopi Goldberg.

I was all, “Gah! You - you - you’re - “

“ - yes I am. What can I getcha?”


Jan 19, 2018

Why does no one understand the quantum physics of time travel? I do.

I’ve never seen so many Quora etiquettes breached in so few words.

You’ve managed to, simultaneously :

Ask a rhetorical question in order to make a statement.

Make an outrageous claim of intellectual achievement.

Offer no evidence to support this.

Offer not even the claim itself (!)


Jan 22, 2018

Why do people edit people's questions on Quora if they tell the truth about a group of people or if they "get too political" in the question?

Questions, by definition, make no assumption. They state nothing, either right or wrong.

The phrase “My question tells the truth” is a contradiction in terms.

Quora is not a game of political Jeopardy, where you come to state the truth in form of a question.


Jan 22, 2018

Are foreigners taking away jobs from Americans?

“Job thief” is a strange double-speak for “hard worker.”

Waves of hard-working immigrants were probably the single biggest factor in America’s economic prosperity.

Then, as now, some people said they had come to “take away jobs” while at the same time accusing them of being lazy free-loaders.

Then, as now, this was said without any apparent awareness of absurdity.


Jan 23, 2018

When did the definitions of prejudice and racism become blurred and/or synonymous? Why do so many American people still not know the difference?

When did the definitions of prejudice and racism become blurred and/or synonymous? Why do so many American people still not know the difference?

Because you’re trying to change the definitions of these terms. (I assume you’re part of the New Left.) You’re encountering not a lack of understanding - people understand all too well what you’re trying to do. Perhaps better than you do. What you’re encountering is a refusal to accept your redefinitions.

Prejudice on the basis of race is racism, as a simple matter of definition.

The New Left doesn’t like those definitions, because they want to say racist things without being called a racist. Cue Orwell :

Racism, they would have us believe, means racial prejudice combined with the institutional power to oppress.

Prejudice, they’d like us to start saying, is the same thing without the power.

Under these redefinitions, there is no such thing as a racist person of color.

People aren’t buying that. The New Left responds by calling them racist, which is even less persuasive.

So. People aren’t going to let you change their dictionaries to suit your agenda. A cogent argument is the only thing you can reasonably expect other people to consider.

(I more directly address the question here - Christopher Reiss's answer to What constitutes racism?)


Jan 23, 2018

What aspects make Ubuntu more secure than Windows 10 for an average user, as of 2018?

Ubuntu has a lot of security built-in, but there’s another consideration to take into account, and a lesson from nature. Here’s a banana :

Look at that thing! This is the Gros Michel banana. It was specially cultivated over decades to be extra yummy - the fruit sweeter, texture creamier, seeds much smaller and more delicate on the palate.

And more! The peels were extra thick and tough, so it didn’t bruise during transport, and lasted longer before over-ripening.

The perfect banana. But you can’t have one.

They’re all dead.

This banana became so popular that it was the most common variety grown in South America, for export to North America and Europe.

Just endless fields of it, as far as the eye could see.

But nature doesn’t like a ‘monoculture’. Nature likes diversity. So she unleashed a fungus that killed that type of banana, and only that type of banana. In 1952, the crops died,

The sweet and durable Gros Michel banana went nearly extinct (and remains only in small numbers today.)

As in nature, it pays to stay out of the monoculture. Ubuntu Desktops are a tiny percentage of the population. There aren’t many viruses targeted against you, and aren’t so many Ubuntu users to catch the virus from.

In 10 years I’ve never run a virus scanner on my linux computer. And not once have I booted up a dead banana.


Jan 24, 2018

How can I increase the top speed of my scooter (Dio 1) without changing my block/bore?

Others have mentioned replacing the exhaust with something more free-flowing; the other side of the hack is the air filter. This is an old hack that I still use; take off the air filter and replace it with a few layers of nylon stocking fabric (you can attach them to the end of the intake hose with a rubber hand.)

Experiment with the # of layers until you find the sweet spot. You need to take care to keep from splashing over puddles and getting the thing wet in general, but you can always graduate to a free-flowing airfilter like this :

In my experience, this should be tried first before monkeying with the exhaust.

As you increase the airflow, it’s likely you’ll want to change the fuel/air mixture on your carburetor. This is usually a small screw, inset like this -

Make adjustments in tiny increments, about an 1/8 of a turn at a time.

Many carbs have epoxy resin over that screw to stop you from doing this. With some acetone (nail polish remover), and exact blade and some patience this comes off pretty easily.

This will increase your fuel consumption (the whole idea!) and may cause the bike to flunk an emissions test.

Finally, you’ll probably need to change the idle setting too, as you increase the power you usually need to decrease the idle.


Jan 24, 2018

What are valuable skills that a Math major should develop for future jobs?

Thanks for the A2A, I majored in Math but didn’t go further than BS, so I know what it’s like to pivot into more earthly pursuits.

The first extra skill is - at the risk of repeating what you’ve endlessly been told - coding. You actually have a bit of an advantage over a CS major, who has to slog through all sorts of things like how a file system and OS works.

Your path can be more selective and perhaps more enjoyable. You can take an approach which is more idea-driven. You can start at the top of the mountain.

Firstly, I would learn something you’ll never use : LISP. You don’t have to learn it cold, just play with it a while. Write a program to factor huge primes. Another to play tic-tac-toe.

Lisp gives you a grasp of functional programming, in a very clean and concise package. You will find lots of learning resources for it.

Secondly, I would play around with Smalltalk, to get a working sense of object-oriented programming. Again, not to become proficient in it, but to get a feel for the object-oriented way of doing things.

Like Ancient Greek and Latin, you will find that patterns and terms from each language appear in every modern language you see. Modern languages are almost all hybrids of OOP and functional programming.

Once you’ve done this, time to really dig deep into a modern language - I would suggest Python. By deep I mean deep, play with the libraries, post sample code to StackExchange (or Quora) and see how it might be written better, look up common interview questions for that language and master them.

Deep learning is all the rage these days, and a lot of programmers are finding themselves a little flat-footed because they didn’t really learn calculus. You, however, know Calculus cold because you’ve taken Mathematical Analysis. You can press this advantage by studying the algorithms used in Deep Learning : Neural Networks and such. Your math background will enable you to recognize at a glance concepts which make a lot of Comp Sci major wince in pain.

Finally, along with the surge in Machine Learning there has emerged the desktop supercomputer : Graphics cards are being used as massively parallel processors. Learn how to do this.

Maybe even build a neural net, of your own design, and make it do things.

So that’s code. The other thing I’d suggest is polish your writing skills. Math majors don’t get much focus on becoming good communicators, unfortunately.

But if you can manage to emerge from school, with a deep knowledge of mathematics and an ability to communicate that knowledge to both man and machine - you will be an exotic creature of boundless potential.


Jan 24, 2018

If the spark plug is bad, will that keep the scooter from starting?

Every time.


Jan 25, 2018

Who are the direct competitors to JUUL?

I'm all about the Aspire Breeze.

It's more reliable (like all Aspire products), and there are infinitely many flavors to choose from. If you mix up your own juice (just pick a flavor and add it to a nicotine-salt solution, all readily available online) it's about 1/10 the cost to refill.


Jan 26, 2018

How do you maintain a respectful atmosphere during political discussions?

I stumbled over a hack for this :

Be selective about whom you argue with. I have learned over many years that most political discussions are thinly veiled name-calling and tribal signaling by folks who have never given politics serious study or thought.

And I found a simple trick to find the exceptions. If somebody supports any person or doctrine, just ask "What parts do you disagree with?"

For example, I'm a Democrat, but I disagree with affirmative action.

From Randian objectivists to Marxists to Critical Race Theorist - this trick works. Because if they haven't found a single point of personal dissension - they aren't thinking. They are just repeating.

What's interesting is that most people fail this test - and they do so in the same way.

There is a long pause. And then this odd smirk as if they've caught you cheating at poker. Then they change the subject.


Jan 26, 2018

What are ideas/applications that can be written in C and can't be written in Python?

All languages are Turing Complete. They are capable of the same things.


Jan 26, 2018

Why does Jordan Peterson refuse to use they/them pronouns?

I sympathize with him. Given the SJW's endless attempts to modify language, I've even abandoned s/he and just use the classic he these days.

I do this to make a point. Two, really. I oppose many changes (like 'cisgendered') on various grounds. More importantly, I choose to assert the right to refuse these changes, if only to remind people that right exists.

Orwell was required reading when I was in high school.


Jan 26, 2018

How could anyone actually believe that "pair programming" is a good idea?

Oh, when it works it works fantastically. Little slips are avoided, huge fuckups are much less likely, and code quality improves with a Just-In-Time code review.

The main problem with it is that it is intensely difficult for certain people (I am one of them.) Some of us need silence and solitude to think. Probably a lot of folks on the Autistic spectrum have this issue - and they are among the best programmers.

If you’re a small company you can often find enough people who take to this way of working.

As you get bigger - and even before - there is the issue that pair programming filters out a whole lot of good people. I’ve seen some places do a hybrid approach, where maybe half the time is paired or half not, or people can opt out and back in. Put simply : Some flexibility to account for different types of brains.

One great thing about having at least some pair programming going on is it acts as a bulwark against micromanaging developer time. It gets management out of the deadly habit of calculating man-hours and encourages a more wholistic assessment of the entire development organization.

Oftentimes, especially in a big consultancy, management is tracking a developer’s time by the minute. A great deal of pair-programming and other collaboration that would naturally arise is inhibited in such an atmosphere. My point is - even if you don’t want to go all-in on pair-programming, make sure that developers have the ability to collaborate at will without getting grief from clock-watchers.


Jan 26, 2018

Is the flat earth movement really a movement or just something we want to be a movement because it’s fun to have something we all agree is ridiculous that we can tear apart with ease?

I’ve always suspected that it’s a piece of brilliant performance art that’s trying to make science more personally meaningful to non scientists.

You can design and perform experiments yourself to determine the shape - and even size - of the earth. The Ancient Greeks did. You don’t need much more than geometry (greek pun intended.) It requires no more equipment than a ten-speed bike and a watch.

A teenager could do this with a friend on a summer day. I think that’s what started the flat-earth thing : to encourage teenagers to do just that, and come back and say, “You’re wrong! We’re just kids but science deals in facts, not degrees! Screw you!”

I’ve always thought the same thing about the old myth that “hot water freezes more quickly than cold.” That one you can check this afternoon without leaving the house.

Sure, it inevitably attracts certain, er, adherents - but it has a great lesson to teach the more skeptical student about thinking - carefully - for yourself. The adherents unwittingly serve the purpose of keeping the myth alive, and hence the lesson.

A recent … creation … by Yishan Wong - which I won’t elaborate on - has been mistakenly branded a troll or just silly prank. It’s not. It’s a great piece of art, cautionary tale, and teaching tool in the same vein.


Feb 2, 2018

Theoretically speaking, what kind of cancerous tumours could develop as an evolutionary advantage for the human species?

One point to remember is that evolutionary pressure applies not just to each individual, but to entire families, tribes, and indeed to the whole species.

So while cancer certainly bestows no advantage on its victim, it does most frequently strike the older members of the species, after they have mated and raised children - when they have become less effective hunters and gatherers.

Thus cancer and other age-related terminal illnesses can add a survival advantage to the whole species or to a subgroup, ruthlessly culling members once their evolutionary contribution is complete, conserving resources for future breeding.


Feb 3, 2018

It bothers me that my spouse smokes cigarettes, especially now that she’s caught a cold. How can I approach her about it?

It’s tough to quit; most smokers really want to but haven’t been able to manage it yet.

One tactic may be to offer an alternative as a first step. Buy her a disposable e-cigarette or some nicotine gum - just to try.

In order to make that first step a short one. Don’t expect instant results, but encourage her at every stage.

“Be not afraid of moving slowly. Be only afraid of standing still.” — Unknown.


Feb 5, 2018

How can you tell if someone who pretends to be against racism is secretly racist?

I know of one necessary, but not sufficient condition.

Racism doesn’t hold up to personal experience. If, for example, a white person is a college student in a city like Cambridge, he is going to interact with lots of brown and black folk.

Some will be juvenile delinquents. Some will be professors at Harvard. Some will be unbelievably gorgeous girls who won’t look at you. Some will be obnoxious. Some will be hilarious.

It isn’t long before any sane person realizes that race doesn’t tell you anything, you have to take people one at a time for who they are. Even to an amoral creature who cares nothing about prejudice towards minorities, this conclusion is inescapable for purely selfish reasons of understanding the world around you.

So a racist is almost always isolated from this experience. They live in an ethnic monoculture, where either everyone is the same race, or their exposure to other races is skewed by sampling bias. (E.g., a cop deals mainly with criminals, a welfare office employee with the poor.)

I’ve never met a white racist who was an exception to this rule. (I’ve also never met one who graduated High School, but that’s a different topic.)


Feb 8, 2018

After World War II had ended, why did the United States government employ thousands of Nazis, thereby giving them the good life, instead of punishing them for their crimes against humanity?

The great lesson of History that emerged from WW 1 is that punishing your defeated enemy might feel good, but a generation later can land you right back into the same damn war.

A thriving democracy is a peaceful neighbor.


Feb 9, 2018

What comes after Trump?

A long - very long - and awkward silence.

Nobody wants to speak first, but with each passing second the tension rises.

Finally somebody - nobody is ever certain who - mumbles meekly :

“Erm. Grbrbdr derble electoral college may be - “

And at once everybody speaks up -

“ - anachronism - “

“- time to do away with - “

“- one man, one vote, not rocket science - “

“- can’t have the fate of the free world riding on swing states - “

“- social media and swing states don’t mix - “

“- definitely time to amend - “

“- pretty sure we could get both parties on board to amend - “

“- yea we gotta fix - “

“ - the Consitution - “

“ - the Consitution - “

“The Constitution.”


Feb 9, 2018

What happened with the "first brain transplant ever" that was planned last year?

Nobody could figure out whose insurance to bill.


Feb 11, 2018

When people use the word blockchain these days, are they usually just talking about distributed ledger tech?

Usually.

Unfortunately, there’s been some marketing sleight-of-hand which has bifurcated the meaning.

From my perspective - a blockchain must be locked down by Proof of Work (miners) and God Himself can’t alter it. These are the key insights of Nakamoto that combine to create a novel and valuable technology.

Ethereum is the purest and most general manifestation of it. We have POW miners locking down a ledger which contains data and code so we get smart contracts. The ultimate blockchain so far.

Moving down the purity spectrum, we have similar schemes using Proof of Stake. Some reasonable people disagree that this is a key distinction, and would include these at the top of the blockchain scale. Fair enough.

Then we have deliberate misapplication of the term ‘block-chain’. True blockchain technology is a disruptive threat to many businesses. Banks have already been embarrassed by Bitcoin : Bitcoin made painfully clear that banks have been clinging to an outdated 24-hour clearing cycle for reasons that range from apathy to self-interest. That’s just for starters.

This has given rise to a new wave of, well, swindlers who want to turn this impending financial mass extinction into good news and a consulting deal. Cryptocurrencies are for drug dealers. The Blockchain, they spin, can be tamed and brought under control of the existing financial structure.

We just need to make some small changes. All those miners - well, skip that part. Who knows who these people are? What if they band together and blackmail us? So that’s not gonna work.

The big boys hold the keys. Behold : The Permissioned Blockchain.

That’s just a distributed ledger. It’s not novel, it’s not interesting, and the only reason companies haven’t already deployed these everywhere is that efficiency wasn’t in their interest. There was no competitor and sitting on money while it’s transacted was an interest-free loan. They even get to charge a fee!

The technology to do it quickly has been in their hands for decades, it is only the imperative to do so which is recent.

Even farther down the list is the mutable permissioned ledger. (Looking at you, Accenture.) This one doesn’t even bother to be an actual ledger; rather whoever has the keys can go change it.

The word Blockchain is most typically used in this corrupted way. It’s bullshit.

More than 99% of Blockchain Use Cases Are Bullshit


Feb 11, 2018

If pi is irrational, does that mean that C/D is the ratio between two numbers where either C or D must be irrational?

The problem with your definition of irrational is that it’s recursive, you’re defining irrational in terms of the quotient of C and D, one of which is irrational.

For further clarification, see Christopher Reiss's answer to If pi is irrational, does that mean that C/D is the ratio between two numbers where either C or D must be irrational?


Feb 11, 2018

Why is heightism accepted in dating and relationships, whereas racism and sexism are frowned upon?

Heightism isn’t a word. Everyone is certainly entitled to prefer the gender and even race of their choosing when it comes to dating. And virtually everyone does.

Life outside a gender studies course is not at all what you’re being led to believe.


Feb 12, 2018

What do social justice warriors consider to be the best example of fiction?

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Wikipedia

They mistake this book for fiction.

It’s history.


Feb 13, 2018

Could we ‘grow’ algorithms to solve and understand chaotic and complex system problems, so that we can build accurate models and predict likely outcomes?

I’ve been attempting to do that. I made a model to predict CryptoCurrency prices; it uses a Neural Network which begins with a single neuron and trains it on historical price data.

Once that neuron is optimized, it adds another one.

When a further neuron no longer improves the model, it stops incepting them.

I post predictions to a twitter account, you can follow it if you’re interested : LuxMachina (@Lux_Machina_) | Twitter

Of course I am not the first to take this ‘organic’ approach to AI, there is a rich field called Genetic algorithm - Wikipedia which, taking its cue from nature, orchestrates a whole jungle of algorithms who must compete for the right to exist and reproduce.


Feb 13, 2018

Is it just me, or is modern racism, sexism, and homophobia, just a capitalist plot to divide the workers?

Karl Marx did warn about precisely this; that the ruling class would foment ethnic strife to distract the workers from their oppression.

But Marx belonged to a broad class of thinkers called political philosophers, all of whom are unheard of on college campuses because they have no Twitter feed.

Did you know that the Muppets character of Miss Piggy is totally fat-shaming and misogynist? We’ve got to do something about that.


Feb 13, 2018

Is it fine to propose to a girl who is my best friend who is in love with her fiance?

I see no possible way in which this perfectly conceived plan could possibly go wrong.


Feb 13, 2018

Did the Japanese expect Germany to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor, and what was Japan's reaction when it did?

Nobody is sure. It’s complicated.

Germany didn’t have advance notice of Pearl Harbor, but had been urging Japan to attack the United States to divert war supplies otherwise headed to Great Britain.

Under the Tripartite Treaty among Germany, Japan, and Italy, each ally was required to come to the defense of another - but to their defense. If a signatory attacked first, they were on their own.

While Germany was urging Japan to attack, shortly before Pearl Harbor, Japan did make known that war was probably ‘imminent’ with the US, and asked if Germany would also declare war even if the war was not in defense.

What we don’t know is what back-channel, semi-sincere assurances may have been insinuated. Nazi Germany certainly had no qualms about making any assurance which would gain them an advantage. Officially, Japan did not know that Germany would declare War. (Which Hitler did the next day, as a sort of absent-minded afterthought.)

The declaration of war against the US was one of the few mistakes that Hitler actually admitted to, in his last testament, written just before his suicide.


Feb 14, 2018

How is it possible that people have survived falling from planes with no parachute in excess of 15,000 feet in the air?

Falling objects reach Terminal velocity - Wikipedia pretty quickly. This is the speed at which the air resistance upward equals the weight downward, and you don’t fall any faster than that.

For a human, who keeps their wits about them, extends their arms and legs without spinning (like an experienced sky-diver), that speed is about 120 MPH.

They will hit most of this speed in the first few hundred feet. So while falling from 15,000 feet sounds (and must be) much scarier, they won’t be moving much faster than if they fell from 500 feet.

At 120 MPH, now you’ve got to get really lucky. Break a few light tree branches. Then a few stronger ones. Bounce off a tree trunk, shattering a leg. Then land in a pile of leaves, and bounce into some mud, to be quickly discovered by someone able to give medical attention.

Looking at the actual numbers, it’s not surprising that people occasionally survive this.


Feb 14, 2018

Does thinking that the African American stereotypical accent sounds annoying be considered racist (same goes with all American southern accents)?

Well, not racist, but I would use the word intolerant.

For most of us, there are accents we find annoying (no offense, Brooklyn), but accents being an accident of upbringing, it’s a good idea to recognize your internal bias and make an effort to keep it in check.

Here’s an amusing exercise. Listen to Richard Feynman’s voice - you can find it on youtube as a recorded lecture series called Five Not So Easy Pieces. (Skip to 6:40)

Feynman sounds almost exactly Ed Norton from the honeymooners; an archetypical doofus if ever there was one.

The contrast between how smart Feyman is and how dumb he sounds is a stunning demonstration of how our ears - and our culture - deceive us.


Feb 14, 2018

How long does it take for a software developer to implement the FizzBuzz algorithm?

No time really, they either get it right away or they fumble it right away. 5 minutes should do it.

To editorialize a bit; using this as an interview tool is something I vehemently disagree with, because the interview ‘context’ is so different than that of actual work - a negative result here tells you alot more about how well they handle interviews than how well they code.


Feb 15, 2018

Why don’t liberals understand that no matter how hard they try, they won’t convert Trump supporters into Democrats?

Convert them to democrats?

I just want to convince them that the Presidency is not an entry-level job.


Feb 15, 2018

How can I download my Quora content?

Thanks for the A2A.

In addition to Brian Bi ‘s python tool, I made a plugin where you can just click and it goes. It just gets your answers though, no blog posts or comments. Here it is : http://ominax.com/quark

Implementing this sort of thing is rather tricky; the infinite scroll of your answers isn’t very … cooperative as you get far down the list.

Both my and Brian Bi’s tool work only on Answers; blog posts would be easy to add; comments might pose a problem because of the sheer number of them.

I don’t presently have time to spend on it, but another person might want to step in or I may be able to return to it at some point.


Feb 15, 2018

If an undercover cop pressures you into buying drugs you normally wouldn't buy (because you are a weak minded person), could that arrest hold up in court?

If an undercover cop pressures you into buying drugs you normally wouldn't buy (because you are a weak minded person), could that arrest hold up in court?

The arrest would be lawful, but I think you mean to ask if the charge of possession could stick.

It could, but the defense could successfully argue that this is entrapment. The litmus test for entrapment is - would the person otherwise have committed the crime, or did the police induce them to do so ?

A famous case of this was Jon Delorean, creator of the iconic Delorean car (featured in the 80’s film Back to the Future ):

Delorean’s company was million of dollars in debt, and undercover narcotics agents approached him with the scheme that he sell a large quantity of cocaine to cover his losses.

He agreed, and was recorded talking about how all this cocaine is “more valuable per gram than gold” in the presence of multiple undercover cops.

The jury found that the police induced a crime he wouldn’t have otherwise committed, so despite being caught red-handed trying to distribute $24M worth of cocaine, he just walked away.


Feb 15, 2018

Is it possible to call a Windows Explorer prompt window in Python to set the selected path as input?

Python seeks to be platform independent, so calling the Windows dialog per se isn’t canonical (and arguably a bad idea.)

How about a cross-platform solution? If you use the TkInter package, on Windows it will launch a selection box pretty indistinguishable from the Windows one. It will also do the same trick on a Mac. And Linux!

from Choosing a file in Python with simple Dialog

from Tkinter import Tk

from tkFileDialog import askopenfilename

Tk().withdraw() # we don't want a full GUI, so keep the root window from appearing

filename = askopenfilename() # show an "Open" dialog box and return the path to the selected file

print(filename)


Feb 15, 2018

What is the origin of the insanity that “vaping” is “not smoking”?

For one, we have the reckless maniacs at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) :

Smokefree | e-cigarettes

An estimated 2.9 million adults in Great Britain currently use e-cigarettes and of these, 1.5 million people have completely stopped smoking cigarettes. They carry a fraction of the risk of cigarettes and can be particularly effective when combined with extra quitting support. — NHS (UK)

Feb 15, 2018

Why is time going to run slower when the gravitational force is stronger?

We really don’t have a why.

It was (another) brilliant flash of intuition on the part of Einstein (and lots of mathematical crunching for him to convince himself of it.)

It began with Newton’s laws, which started to prove broken. Mercury was never where it was supposed to be, for one example. For another, the speed of light always comes out the same, no matter the (constant) speed of the reference frame or the source of the light.

So Einstein proposed to throw out Newton’s laws, and replace them with new laws which a) solved the broken bits and b) acted like Newton’s laws to many decimals the rest of the time.

He proposed this equation, which does all that :

Now Mercury is where it should be. But - how do we know that Einstein didn’t just cook the books, to cleverly find an equation which fit present anomalies in Newton’s Theories?

The equation predicts new anomalies we didn’t know about. This equation predicts that clocks run slower on the first floor than on the second. That was experimentally verified in 1971 (Hafele–Keating experiment - Wikipedia). But the world didn’t have to wait that long, the equation also predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend light like a sort of relativistic “lense”. So all we have to do is wait for an eclipse, and look at a star - and it won’t be where it should be. Einstein’s equation tells us exactly where else it will be. And lo and behold,

So Einstein’s theory supplanted Newton’s since Newton’s had holes in it, Einstein’s didn’t (*), and Einstein’s theory told us where else Newton was wrong and won that bet every time.

That’s about as close as we’ll ever get to “why”. Because our simplest explanation that matches all experiments predicts it; and we found it to be so when we measured it decades later.

(*) Unknown to Einstein at the time, at the subatomic level, Einstein’s formula stops working. More physicists, experimental and theoretical, are probably working on resolving this than any other single problem.


Feb 16, 2018

How does the probabilistic realm of quantum mechanics give rise to the deterministic realm of Newtonian mechanics?

The probabilistic properties of particles “smooth out” as their numbers grow large, creating the illusion of a fluid or continuous world, rather than a discrete and jumpy one.

Consider heat. Before we knew that air was composed of molecules, we understood head as a form of energy which flowed from one object to another, rather like a fluid going through a tube.

And we tend to think of it, and experience it that way. You hold your hand close to a heater, and you feel the ‘heat’ coming off the radiator and warming your hand. (For simplicity we’ll omit the phenomena of infrared radiation, and consider only the warm air that you feel.)

What’s really happening at the molecular level is that the molecules of the heater are vibrating - more energetically than other objects in the room. As an air molecule comes close to the heater, it gets a hard smack from one of these heater-molecules, like a paddle hitting a ball.

Now air molecules are bouncing off the heater at a higher rate of speed and smacking into your hand.

Your sensation of heat is caused by the higher number of molecules hitting your hand per second. Part of the energy you feel is due to the higher speed of the impact, but another part is due to more frequent impacts.

If we shrink our time scale down to a tiny sliver of a second, we can get an interval so small that maybe half the time an impact occurs during that interval, half not.

So now we’re talking about the probability of impact in that tiny interval.

We can do the same thing with surface area, take a tiny portion of your skin and again we’re talking about probability of impact.

While at this scale we’re flipping a coin, as we zoom out the jiggling fades away and we are left with the illusion of a steady, fluid world following almost naively simple laws.

To quote, of all people, Josef Stalin : “Quantity has a Quality all its own.”


Feb 16, 2018

If only massless things can travel at C, and mass is related to energy, and light is a form of energy, how can light travel at C?

A photon has mass-energy; but it’s the one particle that’s all energy and no mass (*)

This seems bizarre, but if we think of it in terms of limits :

kinetic energy = m v^2 for a normal object like a marble.

Now let’s make a weird marble that sheds 3/4 of its mass every time its velocity doubles (maybe most of it blows away!).

then we have

KE ~ (1/v^2) * v^2.

Such a marble would have KE=1 at any speed.

Taking the limit as v goes to infinity, and applying L’Hopital’s rule, we also get 1 as the limit as our marble’s mass goes to zero and its speed goes to infinity.

Infinite speed, no mass, finite energy.

In a relativistic universe, the energy calculation gets more complicated but similar reasoning applies. C is essentially an infinite speed since the photon does not age a nanosecond during its flight. No matter how far it travels, it does so instantaneously.

No object with (rest-) mass can move at the speed of C, because infinite energy is required for an instant trip through space.

Only the ghostly photon, composed of pure motion, does this.

Another way to interpret the Lorenz Transform in Special Relativity is to consider that every object’s motion is a vector in time-space whose magnitude is C. Some of that magnitude is in space, some is in time. If it’s “moving” through space quickly, it moves through time slowly. And vice-versa.

The photon is using all of its magnitude in space, so is frozen in time during its journey.

(*) Gluons technically are also massless.


Feb 16, 2018

What will the time and date be 10,000 hours from 2/17/18?

10,000 hours from midnight, 2/17/18 it will be April 9, 2019, at 4 pm.

Date Calculator: Add to or Subtract From a Date - Results


Feb 17, 2018

How can I remove or change functions using JavaScript or jQuery?

This is called Function Overwriting, and it’s usually available in any Dynamic programming language - Wikipedia which interprets as it goes (as opposed to, say, C++ where compilation is all done ahead of time.)

Just redefine the function to anything you want, or {} if you want it to do nothing. A common hack is to place this redefinition right after the first <body> tag, to ensure that your redefinition comes after all the usual javascript loaded in the <head> section.


Feb 17, 2018

What do social justice warriors mean when they say "stay in your lane"?

“This is a place of respect and inclusion, so you need to get the hell out.”


Feb 17, 2018

Who do you think is worse, the particularly toxic SJWs of today, or the fundamentalist moral guardians of yesteryear?

On balance, the moralistic guardians of the past held sway over culture and politics for centuries. So they probably take first prize for damage.

The SJWs appear to have had very limited effect on society, and even less staying power. Incoming freshman have already begun to voice a counter-revolt.

The major damage they’ve done, as far as I can see, has been to fracture old alliances in the Left along racial and gender lines (the irony!). That may take a while to heal. The one consolation from Trump’s election is that it may serve as a sharp reality check to hasten this re-unification.

The other major damage is personal. A crop of college grads have expended the fire and passion of their youth paralyzed in a mass delusion of moral superiority, spewing racist and sexist newspeak, leaving behind only a failed election and thousands of damning, indelible tweets.

You think old photos of bell-bottoms were bad …


Feb 18, 2018

What is the most complicated word that you use frequently?

Run.

This simple, common word has so many meanings that without context, it signifies barely anything at all.

From Webster’s :

ran \ˈran\ also chiefly dialectal run; run; running

intransitive verb
1 a : to go faster than a walk; specifically : to go steadily by springing steps so that both feet leave the ground for an instant in each step
b of a horse : to move at a fast gallop
c : flee, retreat, escape
dropped the gun and ran
d : to utilize a running play on offense —used of a football team
2 a : to go without restraint : move freely about at will
let chickens run loose
b : to keep company : consort
a ram running with ewes
ran with a wild crowd when he was young
c : to sail before the wind in distinction from reaching or sailing close-hauled
d : roam, rove
running about with no overcoat
3 a : to go rapidly or hurriedly : hasten
run and fetch the doctor
b : to go in urgency or distress : resort
runs to mother at every little difficulty
c : to make a quick, easy, or casual trip or visit
ran over to borrow some sugar
4 a : to contend in a race
b : to enter into an election contest
will run for mayor
5 a : to move on or as if on wheels : glide
file drawers running on ball bearings
b : to roll forward rapidly or freely
c : to pass or slide freely
a rope runs through the pulley
d : to ravel lengthwise
stockings guaranteed not to run
6 : to sing or play a musical passage quickly
run up the scale
7 a : to go back and forth : ply
the train runs between New York and Washington
b of fish : to migrate or move in considerable numbers; especially : to move up or down a river to spawn
8 a : turn, rotate
a swiftly running grindstone
b : function, operate
the engine runs on gasoline
software that runs on her computer
9 a (1) : to continue in force, operation, or production
the contract has two more years to run
the play ran for six months
(2) : to have a specified duration, extent, or length
the manuscript runs nearly 500 pages
b : to accompany as a valid obligation or right
a right-of-way that runs with the land
c : to continue to accrue or become payable
interest on the loan runs from July 1
10 : to pass from one state to another
run into debt
11 a : to flow rapidly or under pressure
b : melt, fuse
c : spread, dissolve
colors guaranteed not to run
d : to discharge liquid (such as pus or serum)
a running sore
12 a : to develop rapidly in some specific direction; especially : to throw out an elongated shoot of growth
b : to tend to produce or develop a specified quality or feature
they run to big noses in that family
13 a : to lie in or take a certain direction
the boundary line runs east
b : to lie or extend in relation to something
c : to go back : reach
d (1) : to be in a certain form or expression
the letter runs as follows
(2) : to be in a certain order of succession
14 a : to occur persistently
musical talent runs in the family
b (1) : to remain of a specified size, amount, character, or quality
profits were running high
(2) : to have or maintain a relative position or condition (as in a race)
ran third
running late
c : to exist or occur in a continuous range of variation
shades run from white to dark gray
15 a : to spread or pass quickly from point to point
chills ran up her spine
b : to be current : circulate
speculation ran rife
transitive verb
1 a : to cause (an animal) to go rapidly : ride or drive fast
b : to bring to a specified condition by or as if by running
ran himself to death
c : to go in pursuit of : hunt, chase
dogs that run deer
d : to follow the trail of backward : trace
ran the rumor to its source
e : to enter, register, or enroll as a contestant in a race
f : to put forward as a candidate for office
g : to carry (the football) on a running play
2 a : to drive (livestock) especially to a grazing place
b : to provide pasturage for (livestock)
c : to keep or maintain (livestock) on or as if on pasturage
3 a (1) : to pass over or traverse with speed
(2) : to run on or over in athletic competition
runs the bases well
run the floor
b : to accomplish or perform by or as if by running
ran a great race
run errands
c : to slip or go through or past
run a blockade
run a red light
d : to travel on in a boat
run the rapids
4 a : to cause to penetrate or enter : thrust
ran a splinter into her toe
b : stitch
c : to cause to pass : lead
run a wire in from the antenna
d : to cause to collide
ran his head into a post
e : smuggle
run guns
5 : to cause to pass lightly or quickly over, along, or into something
ran her eye down the list
6 a : to cause or allow (a vehicle or a vessel) to go in a specified manner or direction
ran the car off the road
b : operate
run a lathe
c : to direct the business or activities of : manage, conduct
run a factory
d : to employ or supervise in espionage
run an agent
7 a : to be full of or drenched with
streets ran blood
b : contain, assay
8 a : to cause to move or flow in a specified way or into a specified position
run cards into a file
b : to cause to produce a flow (as of water)
run the faucet
; also : to prepare by running a faucet
run a hot bath
9 a : to melt and cast in a mold
run bullets
b : treat, process, refine
run oil in a still
run a problem through a computer
10 : to make oneself liable to : incur
ran the risk of discovery
11 : to mark out : draw
run a contour line on a map
12 a : to permit (charges) to accumulate before settling
run a tab at the bar
—often used with up
ran up a large phone bill
b : cost 1
rooms that run $50 a night
13 a : to produce by or as if by printing —usually used with off
ran off 10,000 copies of the first edition
b : to carry in a printed medium : print
every newspaper ran the story
14 a : to make (a series of counts) without a miss
run 19 in an inning in billiards
b : to lead winning cards of (a suit) successively
c : to alter by addition
ran his record to six wins and four losses
15 : to make (a golf ball) roll forward after alighting
16 baseball : to eject (a player, coach, or manager) from a game
Ron Luciano ran Weaver early in game one of a doubleheader in 1975, and then ran him again during the lineup meeting prior to the start of game two. —Jeff Burd
— run across
: to meet with or discover by chance
— run a fever or run a temperature
: to have a fever
— run after
1 : pursue, chase; especially : to seek the company of
2 : to take up with : follow
run after new theories
— run against
1 : to meet suddenly or unexpectedly
2 : to work or take effect unfavorably to : disfavor, oppose
— run a tight ship
: to have strict and exacting standards in controlling or managing something (such as a business)
— run by or run past
: to present to (as for evaluation)
ran some ideas by her
— run circles around or run rings around
: to show marked superiority over : defeat decisively or overwhelmingly
— run dry
1 : to use up an available supply
2 : to become exhausted or spent
his inspiration had run dry
— run interference
: to provide assistance by or as if by clearing a path through obstructions
ran interference for me with the press
— run into
1 a : to change or transform into : become
b : to merge with
c : to mount up to
their yearly income often runs into six figures
2 a : to collide with
b : to meet by chance
ran into an old classmate the other day
— run low on
: to approach running out of
running low on options
— run one's mouth
: to talk excessively or foolishly
— run riot
1 : to act wildly or without restraint
2 : to occur in profusion
daffodils running riot
— run short
: to become insufficient
— run short of
: to use up : run low on
— run the numbers
: to perform calculations
— run the table
1 : to sink all remaining shots without missing in pool
2 : to win all remaining contests
— run to
: to mount up to
the book runs to 500 pages
— run upon
: to run across : meet with
— run with
1 : to use or exploit fully : make the most of
took the idea and ran with it
2 : to publicize widely
the press ran with the quote

Feb 19, 2018

What is something that you know about Quora but others don't?

The people with the most followers generally have no idea how many followers they have.

This principle can be generalized.


Feb 21, 2018

If you would be a girl and found out your boyfriend is pregnant, and if he would tell you that it isn't his child, would you believe it?

I think … there is some confusion here regarding biology …


Feb 23, 2018

What is a more general word for "character" that encompasses both people and objects?

Integrity.


Feb 23, 2018

Do the US Navy SEALs realise they have a silly name?

I don’t think SEALs think their name is silly.

Rumor does have it that, however, that just this notion was the second to last thing to go through Bin Laden’s mind.


Feb 23, 2018

Would it be fair to say that Quora has a sizeable SJW population [not personally using this word in a pejorative sense]?

They are a significant minority, sure. But I think Quora has done a better job than most universities and media outlets in protecting divergent views.

Despite being a Lefty (I have sworn off the word Liberal until the SJWs have stopped hogging the mic), I have written about a dozen posts which express my personal - contempt is the only honest word - for the SJW movement.

None have been collapsed and while people disagree with equal vigor in the comments - I respect their right to do that and even upvote their comments.

On balance, in my experience anyway, Quora is perhaps the gold standard for upholding ideological diversity within the confines of BNBR.


Feb 23, 2018

How do we know with so much certainty what lies inside an atom since an atom itself is so small for us to see despite all the technological advances?

Logic sees much farther than our eyes can.

Has a man ever walked here ?

Well - we don’t see one, but sure. We can also tell he was alone, he was here before the last high tide when the water washes over the sand, what direction he was going. We can even make a good guess as to their gender and weight.

We cannot see a guy, but we still know he exists. If you object, “Well, duh! But we can see the footprints”, that only means your indirect way of identifying unseen objects through reason has become so innate you’re not aware of it.

Physics uses a far more complex set of reasoning, bristling with equations. But the scheme is the same.

Reason illuminates a cosmos almost entirely beyond the grasp of our senses.


Feb 24, 2018

What writers should have been included in the Top Writer Class of 2018 but were not?

The 15 year-old math prodigy Lev Kruglyak has only 150 answers, but his output is of stunning quality and I am prepared to argue he should be top of the list ahead of anybody else.

Next up in no particular order, Cem Arslan writes deep articles in history and politics, from outside the prevailing heterdox views - he’s an important dissenting voice on many topics.

Tarry Singh is holding up a great deal of the Machine Learning topic on Quora. He fields questions from beginner to advanced.

Nice to see Jeff Mwangi’s name, a fine addition to the ’18 class! I hope to get to meet him at a TW meetup.


Feb 25, 2018

How do we sever the Trump-Evangelical tie? What would have to happen? He is losing the 2nd amendment people, what about religion?

It is my sense that many, if not most, evangelical Christians take a dim view of Trump and don’t want him showing up under their tent. Dennis Huxley ?


Feb 26, 2018

Is it true that if the number of very talented software architects on an ambitious project is less than one or more than one, the project will fail?

Christ, no.

Everyone should - and must - learn architecture, implementation, error instrumentation, testability, UI.

Because these are all artificial distinctions created to conceal one universal, but very scary fact.

Making great software is hard. We know some people can do it.

We don’t really know why they can.

It’s a miracle of human productivity, like writing and music.

That’s frustrating to the business world. We want to dissect the miracle, standardize its parts, and mass produce it.

It won’t work. All the world’s music theorists cannot make even a single Mozart.

This is the reason billion dollar companies keep losing to 20 year olds.


Feb 27, 2018

Why are some people suddenly believing that racism is prejudice plus power, when the definition of racism is simply prejudice based on race?

It’s a deliberate and calculated deception.

The aims are simple. A minority group, white males, are to be targeted for the blame and redress of historical grievances by the majority. A subgroup with a greater proportional share of wealth and power.

The word ‘racist’ carries an emotional impact. It means of course a person who devalues people of another race. Such people are reviled. The word itself evokes outrage.

The goal of assigning blame and burden to white males puts us on the receiving end of the word racist’s visceral power. Put simply : our goal is racist. That’s a problem.

So we steal the word. We change it, so that non-white people can’t be racist. Orwell wrote about it decades ago,

It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

So, define racist as prejudice plus power. Now only white people are racist. Cool trick, huh?

After all, wasn’t the dictionary written by white men? And isn’t language evolving? What harm is done if we modify the term to further our aims?

I will tell you the harm.

It destroys the term “racist”. The real one - a person who puts race before character. We badly need it. You can’t have it.

My heritage is German Jewish. As kid, I tried to understand what happened in Germany, how a normally civilized people came to a place of shattering glass, where a subgroup - whose only apparent crime was doing well for themselves - became the target of a people’s pent-up fury for all past and present misery . Each and every one of them, even the children. Guilty at birth.

It is with the most profound sadness and grief that I see it now. The banner now is “Intersectionality.” About as meaningless as “National Socialism”, but I suppose any name at all will do.

Please. Read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four - Wikipedia . And don’t let anyone tell you how to interpret it.

Your mind is still free.

1984 is available to read at no charge here : http://ww.george-orwell.org/1984/22.html

Also as a free audiobook :


Feb 27, 2018

Is it always necessary that each variable has separate memory address in programming?

No,

In C++ for example, a variable can reference (be a pointer to) another variable. They share the same memory.

This creates interesting problems for garbage collection - you have to make sure a variable has no pointer references to it before destroying it. This is often done with some kind of “Safe Pointer” class, which keeps count of the number of references that are active.


Feb 28, 2018

Is life just a bunch of if-else statements?

Nah.

It’s a while-not-dead event loop.


Feb 28, 2018

What is harder to quit and more addicting? Cigarettes or weed? Which drug has worse withdrawals and why?

Oh it’s not even close.

Weed has a component of psychological addiction, some folks become rather reliant on its mellowing effects. But it’s not really addictive in any real sense of the term.

Tobacco is straight up super-addictive; after you quit you can have intense and sudden cravings for a year or two. (In my case, vaping got me off the hook painlessly.)


Feb 28, 2018

What would’ve happened if Operation Overlord (D-Day) had failed?

I think even if the Atlantic Wall had held, and the allies never secured the beach-heads, the purpose would have been served.

Germany was now bleeding out of both ears as it fought an active, massive battle on two fronts. Their defeat was now a certainty.

If Germany had managed to hold on through the summer of 1945, a very nasty surprise awaited them courtesy of Los Alamos.


Feb 28, 2018

Can we all now admit that President Trump doesn't really want Congress to pass legislation replacing DACA to protect dreamers?

I spend ten minutes a day reporting questions like this.

Quora is not a place to broadcast your opinions phrased as a rhetorical question.


Mar 1, 2018

How can people on the Left call conservatives like Ben Shapiro Nazis when Antifa is constantly using violence and mobs to silence views they don’t like on campuses nationwide?

Using rhetorical questions to soapbox is starting to get out of hand on Quora.

I urge people to report questions like these whenever we seem them.

I agree with your politics, by the way, but this is corrosive to Quora’s purpose and culture.


Mar 2, 2018

Were Native American tribes “disarmed then slaughtered” as I’ve read and heard many say? If so, does this help support a pro 2nd Amendment argument that it’s a foil against governments becoming tyrannical?

Native Americans hadn’t developed gunpowder.

So, no.


Mar 2, 2018

How do I setup a monero mining rig as a real newbie, technically oriented for the purpose of some bucks each month?


Mar 4, 2018

Why do Americans say "excuse me" instead "I am sorry" after a sneeze?

There is an American tendency to simplify language, making it more efficient at the expense of perfunctory utterances which don’t convey meaning.

In parts of New England, one is expected to say nothing at all after sneezing, and even the resultant “bless you”-”thank you” exchange is briefly tolerated, though Real Yankees prefer the sneeze go unacknowledged.


Mar 6, 2018

If we are nearing the end of gender, and it seems like we are, does that mean everyone will finally be able to get off a sinking ship?

Titanic didn’t have enough life-boats.

Men can’t have babies.

Facts are stubborn things.


Mar 7, 2018

If you were to single out a person as the winner of WWII, who would that be and why?

Gotta be Stalin.

Stalin got Eastern Europe - the very prize which lured the Nazis to war in the first place, he was hailed as a hero of the Soviet people, and he got to exact bitter revenge on his enemies.


Mar 9, 2018

What are the advantages of using python for trading algorithm?

I use Python for a trading algorithm, even though I’ve got C++ chops honed finely enough to contribute code to the browser you’re probably reading this on (WebKit.)

Here are my reasons :

Less code. This is the biggest one. Python is very focussed on clarity though brevity, and the joke that “every program is 17 lines of Python” is only a half joke. When it comes to trading actual money, you want the code quickly scannable by any human to be verifiably bug free.

Interpreted : You can step through python code, making live changes to code and data. This enables debugging which is more thorough and comprehensive.

Batteries Included : The API for your favorite trading platform is probably already available in Python. You can also grab a graphing package (matplotlib), simple GUI framework (TkInter), and scientific calculator (numpy).

Culture : When in Rome, speak Latin. Most people doing this sort of thing are doing it in Python. This means you’ll be able to collaborate more easily with others, trade code, get help and so on.

AI : Your bot may start simple, but soon you may want to experiment with exotic techniques like Neural Networks. Python is the most popular language for Neural Networks (with R coming up on its heels, and C++ always a close 3rd). Or, if you want to do some kind of intelligence which is more out-of-the-box; like counting Github commits to a cryptocurrency or scanning Twitter for mentions, Python excels at this sort of scraping activity, again in very few lines.

So Python is likely to give you the least trouble, making it easy to code up not just your best idea, but also your next idea.

(Disclosure : I do link to C++ code in order to do fast vector operations CUDA/OpenCL) on the GPU; but I rarely look at that code once it’s running. It’s very focussed on simple arithmetic.)


Mar 9, 2018

Before their rise to power how were the Nazis able to build up such a large army without getting stopped by the German government?

It wasn't an army per se, rather it was a paramilitary group called the "brown shirts" or SA (Sturmabteilung). Street politics in the latter Weimar Republic (1930ish) had become militarized, using combat vets and weapons from the First World War.

The Communists followed a similar pattern, so you had armed, violent clashes as the two rivals got more powerful and centrists ran for their lives.

The tug-of-war escalated until finally one side fell - the Communists - leaving only a Nazi military dictatorship.


Mar 14, 2018

If Jesus Christ approaches you and tells you, "I am back", would you become a Christian?

Maybe.

I’d definitely clear my browser history.


Mar 14, 2018

Is gradient descent "greedy"?

Yea, that’s the big trade-off.

Gradient descent is fast and robust but untrustworthy in the extreme.

I usually do a two-stage approach. Stage one is raining down anywhere from 1,000 to 1,000,000 starting points in the space.

Let them all roll downhill in their preferred direction.

Stage 2 is to cull the list; remove points which are getting close to each other, so that 100 or 1000 points remain that are a good distance apart. Slow time down, so that each step down the gradient is tip-toe, not a leap, and let those last candidates slowly roll to a rest.

This makes it hard for the real solution to hide in a thicket of local extrema.


Mar 14, 2018

Were there any discussions of Quora's Links feature in the Top Writers Facebook group? Did Quora staff people react to them?

Not that I noticed.


Mar 17, 2018

If Quorans could be likened to Tolkien characters, who would be who (keep it nice)?

Dibs on Sauron.


Mar 17, 2018

What is using Christopher Reiss' QuArk tool to download your Quora content like?

The latest version requires no license key, so I may be biased here, but it’s a one-click operation (though it may take several hours depending on how many answers you have) and is, like, the coolest thing ever.

The result is a big HTML file you can save to your desktop. Looks like this :

It’s very much like your own https://www.quora.com/content feed, but with some important differences. The page is quickly navigable, since it’s local and light-weight, so you can whisk up and down your entire history with ease. You can’t do that with your content feed. This becomes even more drastic if you take the “pro-tip” to heart and download all your images as well to your local drive.

You can also import this file into your favorite word processor (that may take a while.)

Once downloaded, I found it an interesting exercise in nostalgia. Once I got past that though, I did find a daily use-case for it :

Being able to search all my content by keyword or phrase enables me to find stuff that I vaguely remember writing.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched up an answer of mine to send on Facebook or wherever. (The archive includes the link back to your answer on Quora.)

I end up sending more eyeballs to Quora this way than I used to.


Mar 18, 2018

Why is artificial intelligence driven by Python and not C++?

AI is essentially a math problem. Here’s a random snippet from Google’s popular Word2vec algorithm,

So AI researchers have their hands full with linear algebra, matrices doing all sorts of strange things, and so on.

They haven’t the slightest interest in how these calculations are done on the machine, so long as they are accurate and fast. They don’t want their math getting mixed up with issues like float or double, memory management, parallel processing, persisting data and all that.

This isn’t necessarily out of ignorance, my background is both math and C++ - but I still don’t want those things mixed up together.

Since they are separable, and really orthogonal (totally independent) aspects of what you’re doing, it makes things much clearer to have Python up front where your model is defined, and C++ under the hood crunching the numbers - whether as a Python module like PyTorch (written in C++) or your own C++ engine. Python excels at clarity; C++ excels at speed.

Put another way, suppose you invent another word2vec but 10x as awesome. Everybody will want to see your Python code. Nobody will care about your C++ engine.

In this sense, Python is a natural place for the model to “live”.


Mar 18, 2018

Is there a word for a "clueless"/"absent minded"/"having an existential crisis"/"numb" look on someone's face?

"Gobsmacked."


Mar 21, 2018

Which carcinogen in tobacco is likely to have the strongest impact on carcinogenesis through tobacco-smoking?

Tobacco-specific nitrosamines - Wikipedia are the group of compounds thought to be the worst carcinogens.

They are formed when nicotine is heated to high temperature as in smoking or fire-cured chewing tobacco. At high enough temperature, nicotine combines with nitrate to form TSNA.

Interestingly, nicotine in its original alkaloid state has not been shown to be carcinogenic. So nicotine replacement therapy like the patch or gum greatly reduce cancer risk. This may also be true of vaping, which has tested low for TSNA levels, though I’m not aware of any proper clinical tests of this.


Mar 21, 2018

What are all the documentaries available on Curiosity Stream?

I should first say that Curiosity Stream has awesome content, I’ve really been enjoying their stuff. The title “First Man” is by far the best documentary I’ve seen about the evolutionary rise of man, I was really blown away.

There doesn’t seem to be a catalogue anywhere, however (or even a sitemap.) So I wrote a crawler to make a list of titles.

This is as of March 21, 2018. It isn’t quite complete, it’s about 80% of them all, I’ll be back soon to complete the list.

Science : Silent War - The Battles Beneath The Sea

Science : Secret Life of Cats

Science : Packing For Mars

Science : Reversing Alzheimers

Science : The Secret Life of Dogs - Series 2

Science : Human Universe

Science : Spy In The Wild

Science : Nature's Mathematics

Science : David Attenborough's Ant Mountain

Science : Wonders Of Life

Science : European Inventor Award 2017

Science : Space Probes!

Science : The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World

Science : Birth Of The Solar System

Science : Rise Of The Continents

Science : Super Smart Animals

Science : Cassini: The Grand Finale

Science : David Attenborough's Light On Earth

Science : Conversations with Dolphins

Science : Yellowstone

Science : Top Science Stories Of 2017

Science : Amazing Gravity

Science : The Wizard of H2O

Science : Deep Ocean: Lights In The Abyss

Science : Hubble's Imager

Science : Our Violent Sun

Science : Hummingbirds: Jewelled Messengers

Science : World's Best Dinosaur Fossil

Science : The Secret Life Of Dogs

Science : Great Barrier Reef

Science : Destination: Moon

Science : Exploring Quantum History With Brian Greene

Science : Planet Dinosaur

Science : Bird Brain

Science : Rosetta's Final Mission

Science : Earth: The Power Of The Planet

Science : Walking With Monsters: Life Before Dinosaurs

Science : Order And Disorder

Science : Life On Us

Science : Africa's Lost Wolves

Science : Predict My Future: The Science Of Us

Science : Garden Wild!

Science : Seven Ages Of Starlight

Science : Illusions - Season 2

Science : Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time

Science : Big World In A Small Garden

Science : Wild Horses Of The Marshes

Science : How To Grow A Planet

Science : Prescription: Nutrition

Science : Inside The Human Body

Science : Nature Tech

Science : Secret Life Underground

Science : Curious Minds: Astronomy

Science : Steve Backshall's Extreme Mountain Challenge

Science : Planet Parrot

Science : The Mystery of Dark Energy

Science : The Eighth Continent: Zealandia

Science : European Inventor Award 2016

Science : The Science Of Sleep

Science : Destination: Pluto Beyond The Flyby

Science : The Making Of David Attenborough's Light On Earth

Science : Leaps In Evolution

Science : Digits

Science : Homo naledi

Science : Ancient Earth

Science : Walking With Beasts

Science : Making An Ancient Forest: Kalkalpen National Park

Science : Catching History's Criminals: The Forensics Story

Science : Scanning The Pyramids (Extended Version)

Science : Secrets Of Bones

Science : Walking With Dinosaurs Special: The Ballad Of Big Al

Science : Curious Minds: Marine Archaeology

Science : The Lynx Liaison

Science : The Origami Code

Science : The Renaissance Factor

Science : The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs

Science : Is Binge Drinking That Bad?

Science : Wonders Of The Solar System

Science : Cyber War

Science : Walking With Dinosaurs

Science : The Joy Of...

Science : Breakthrough: The Earliest Americans

Science : The Secret Life Of Chaos

Science : Illusions - Season 1

Science : Ships Of The Desert

Science : Deep Time History

Science : Meditation: Can It Change You?

Science : Isaac Newton: The Last Magician

Science : Curious Minds: Oceans

Science : Reef Expeditions

Science : Mark Emery's American Wildlife

Science : Stephen Hawking's Universe

Science : Deep Ocean: The Lost World Of The Pacific

Science : Life On Fire

Science : How To Build A Dinosaur

Science : Curious Minds: Paul Reed Smith

Science : Mathemagics

Science : Curious Minds: Brain Health

Science : Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places

Science : Secret Life of Lakes

Science : The Secrets Of Quantum Physics

Science : Wonders Of The Universe

Science : Casey's Wild Backyard

Science : Miracles Of Nature

Science : Tales Of Nature

Science : Animal Super Senses

Science : Breakthrough

Science : Enigma Man: A Stone Age Mystery

Science : The Ultimate Formula

Science : The Hunt For Dark Matter

Science : Valley of 10,000 Smokes

Science : Insights On The Human Face Of Big Data

Science : Prehistoric Autopsy

Science : Wild Venice

Science : Curious Minds: Marine Conservation

Science : The Power Of Volcanos

Science : Curious Minds: The Science of Sleep

Science : Origins Of Land: Earth In Motion

Science : Destination: Pluto

Science : Wild Weather With Richard Hammond

Science : Trust Me, I'm A Doctor

Science : Eclipse Across America

Science : A.I. & the Destiny of Mankind

Science : Dawn Of The Ocean

Science : Ocean Stories

Science : The Diesel Mystery

Science : Genius By Stephen Hawking

Science : Destination: Jupiter

Science : Hyaena: Queen Of The Masai Mara

Science : Keas: New Zealand's Witty Daredevils

Science : The Human Limits

Science : Asia - Secret Lives, Hidden Places

Science : Catalyst - Season 1

Science : Our Genes Under Influence

Science : Scanning The Pyramids

Science : Kittenhood

Science : A Curious World (Season 2)

Science : The Moon's Spell On The Great Barrier Reef

Science : The Real War Of Thrones

Science : The Health Of Our Oceans

Science : Madagascar: The Lost Makay

Science : Puma!

Science : Cosmic Front

Science : Unraveling The Creative Mind

Science : Curious Minds: Space

Science : The Planets

Science : Building The Sun: The 250 Million Degree Problem

Science : Top Science Stories Of 2016

Science : The Dark - Nature's Nighttime Worlds

Science : Invisible Universe

Science : The Human Face Of Big Data

Science : Curious Minds: The Internet

Science : 300 Million Years

Science : Nature's Weirdest Events (Season 2)

Science : Crocodiles: Caring Killers

Science : Don't Panic: The Truth About Population

Science : Do We Really Need the Moon?

Science : Wildlife

Science : Walking With Cavemen

Science : A Winter's Tale: The Journey Of The Snowy Owls

Science : Underwater Wonders Of The National Parks

Science : Lionsrock: Return Of The King

Science : Dream The Future

Science : Becoming Superhuman

Science : Happiness At Work

Science : Ocean Resurrection

Science : Rosetta, Comet Chaser

Science : Jacques Cousteau's Legacy

Science : Brain Factory

Science : Curious Minds: Innovation

Science : Mars: The Journey

Science : Masdar: Exploring Our Future

Science : ROSETTA Memories Of A Comet

Science : Curiosity Retreats 2015 Lectures

Science : Why Are We Here?

Science : Curiosity Retreats 2016 Lectures

Science : Particle Fever

Science : Rocket Men

Science : Origins Of Land

Science : Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation

Science : Curious Minds: Extraterrestrial Life

Science : Viruses: Destruction And Creation

Science : Engadin: Switzerland's Wilderness

Science : Curious Minds: The Future

Science : The Nano Revolution

Science : Butterfly Effect - Season 2

Science : Into The Lost Crystal Caves

Science : Next World

Science : Is Anybody Out There?

Science : Nature's Weirdest Events (Season 1)

Science : Killer Whales - The Ultimate Guide

Science : Curiosity Retreats 2014 Lectures

Science : Super Cute Animals

Science : Destination Mars

Science : A Curious World

Science : Horizon

Science : Curious Minds: String Theory

Science : Operation Dolittle

Science : The Manot Skull

Science : Termites: The Inner Sanctum

Science : Lascaux: How To Save 18,000 Years Of History

Science : Curious Minds: Creativity

Science : China's Last Stand

Science : Butterfly Effect - Season 1

Science : Facing The Killer Volcano

Science : Curious Minds: Happiness

Science : The Age Of Hubble

Science : Curious Minds: Science of the Mind

Science : The Rise & Fall Of T-Rex

Science : The Secret Life Of Snakes

Science : Dynamic Salt

Science : Curious Minds: Ebola

Science : Curious Minds: Future Medicine

Science : Curious Minds: Nanotechnology

Science : Naturopolis

Science : The Secret Life Of Materials

Science : Follow Your Nose: Cracking Smell's Code

Science : Insect Dissection

Science : Tricky Memory

Science : Inside a Virtuoso's Brain

Science : Curious Minds: Climate Change

Science : Shark Dive

Science : Moonshots

Science : Space Robot Revolution

Science : Life 2,000 Meters Under The Sea

Science : Pleasure And Pain

Science : The Cholesterol Question

Science : Curious Minds: Science In Society

Science : Crude

Science : Curious Minds: Animals

Science : Curious Minds: The Cosmos

Science : The Year Of The Hedgehog

Science : Prehistoric Astronomers

Science : Big Picture Earth (Music)

Science : The Secret Of The Phaistos Code

Science : The Biblical Plagues

Science : Climate Change By The Numbers

Science : Space Odyssey - Voyage To The Planets

Science : Norman Seeff's The Sessions

Science : The US East Coast

Science : Microbirth

Science : The Science Of Everyday Living

Science : The Real Sherlock Holmes

Science : Miniverse

Science : Walking With Dinosaurs Special: Lands Of Giants

Science : The Science Of Deception

Science : Curious Minds: Dinosaurs

Science : Big Picture Earth (Natural sound)

Science : Jason Silva: The Road To The Singularity

Science : First Man

Science : Waiting for Elephants

Science : Tornado Season

Science : Curious Minds: Pluto

Science : Ol' Man River, The Mighty Mississippi

Science : Science Vs. God?

Science : Walking with Dinosaurs Special: Sea Monsters

Science : Children Of The Stars

Science : Curious Minds: Consciousness

Science : Dark Secrets Of The Cosmos

Science : Curious Minds: Understanding Memory

Science : Earth's Survival

Science : Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima

Science : The Pray

Science : Jason Silva: Transhumanism

Science : Curious Minds: Technology

Science : Brain Overload

Science : Science Shorts

Science : Curious Minds: Quantum Computing

Science : Curious Minds: The Universe

Science : From Baby To Kiss

Science : Creating An Ocean

Science : The Great Australian Fly

Science : Curious Minds: Epigenetics

Science : Naica: Secrets Of The Crystal Cave

Science : The Snake Sultan

Science : Children Of The Wild

Science : Consciousness: Stuart Hameroff Interview

Science : The Indifferent Amazing Universe

Science : The Worm Hunters

Science : Curious Minds: Psychology

Science : Inside A Trader's Brain

Science : The Dangers Of The Zika Virus

Science : Walking with Dinosaurs Special: The Giant Claw

Science : Curious Minds: Health

Science : Second Century Stewardship: Acadia National Park

Science : Can We Believe The Science?

Science : A Natural History Of Laughter

Science : Sea Rex

Science : One World

Science : Waiting For Immortality

Science : Curious Minds: Robotics

Science : NASA: Water On Mars

Science : Sad People Factory

Science : World War A: Aliens invade Earth

Science : The Truth About Healthy Eating

Science : Climate: A Few Degrees Less

Science : Curious Minds: Global Food Supply

Science : Mark Lewis Documentaries

Science : Quarx

Science : Curious Minds: Deepak Chopra

Science : Curious Minds: Food Science

Science : Hijos de las Estrellas

Science : Nature Fights Back In Chernobyl (English subtitles)

Science : Virus-Destrucción y Creación

Science : Mind Blowing Breakthroughs

Science : El Virus Zika

Science : Virus-Destruição e Criação

History : Italy's Invisible Cities

History : Rome's Invisible City

History : The Six Queens Of Henry VIII

History : Kim Philby - His Most Intimate Betrayal

History : The Celts: Blood, Iron & Sacrifice

History : The Normans

History : Curious Minds: David McCullough

History : Hiroshima

History : Jack London

History : Sherlock Holmes against Conan Doyle

History : Mont Saint-Michel: Scanning The Wonder

History : Vikings

History : Operation Grand Canyon With Dan Snow

History : After Braveheart

History : The Time Traveller's Guide To Elizabethan England

History : Winston Churchill: A Giant In The Century

History : Egypt

History : World of Stonehenge

History : Bronze Age

History : Curious Minds: China

History : Codebreaker - The Secret Genius Of World War Two

History : The Fabulous Life Of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portraitist Of Marie-Antoinette

History : Saints and Sinners: Millennium of Monasteries

History : Curious Minds: The Bronze Age

History : The Ascent Of Money

History : Classic Cars

History : Ancient Worlds

History : Beijing: Biography Of An Imperial Capital

History : America's Declaration

History : D-Day

History : The Real Mary Poppins

History : Our World War

History : Tea War: The Adventures Of Robert Fortune

History : The Birth Of Shopping

History : The Real Tom Thumb: History's Smallest Superstar

History : The Real Adam Smith

History : Chiefs

History : Plane Resurrection

History : Knights

History : War Of 1812

History : Inside Hitler's Killing Machine: The Nazi Camps - An Architecture of Murder

History : Storm Over Europe

History : Scotland: Rome's Final Frontier

History : 1929

History : David Starkey's Magna Carta

History : Chambord: The Castle, The King & The Architect

History : Delphi: Why It Matters

History : Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams

History : Hamburg Port: Giant Of The North

History : Marie Tussaud: A Legend In Wax

History : Behind The Scenes: Madame Tussaud's New York

History : Churchill's First World War

History : The Twilight Of Civilizations

History : Pearl Harbor: Into The Arizona

History : Vietnam Nurses

History : Hergé: In The Shadow Of Tintin

History : The Mystery Of The Disorderly Warriors

History : Who Was Johnny Appleseed?

History : My Daughter Anne Frank

History : Afghanistan 1979

History : Frank Sinatra Or America's Golden Age

History : Ancient Rome: The Rise And Fall Of An Empire

History : Time To Remember

History : Titanic's Tragic Twin

History : Curious Minds: Middle East

History : Ships That Changed The World

History : WWI: Hidden Traces

History : America's World War I Centennial

History : Promises And Betrayals: Britain And The Struggle For The Holy Land

History : Lord Of Sipan

History : D-Day: Hidden Traces

History : The Ottomans: Europe's Muslim Emperor

History : King: A Filmed Record...Montgomery to Memphis

History : The Man Who Shot Tutankhamun

History : The Crusades

History : The Tulip Bubble

History : Napoleon: The Russian Campaign

History : The First World War From Above

History : The Golden Age Of Steam Railways

History : Getting Frank Gehry

History : Hitler's Miracle Weapons

History : #GeorgeWashington

History : Lincoln's Last Night

History : Hiroshima: Hidden Traces

History : Alexander The Great

History : Mysteries Of The Bible: Unlocked (Season 2)

History : Samurai Castle

History : Holy War

History : The Vietnam War: Hidden Traces

History : Curious Minds: Anthropology

History : Hitler's Mountain: Hidden Traces

History : The Disappearance Of The PX-15

History : Supersonic Women: A Duel In The Sky

History : Stalin - Trotsky: A Battle To Death

History : Mysteries Of The Bible: Unlocked (Season 1)

History : Curious Minds: Titanic

History : Deadly Journeys Of The Apostles

History : Presidents In Crisis

History : Scribes Of Ancient Egypt

History : Bonaparte: The Egyptian Campaign

History : Destiny of Rome

History : JFK: Fact & Fable

History : Rebuilding Ancient Rome

History : Killing Hitler

History : Curious Minds: American History

History : The Domesday Book

History : The Hunt for the Slave Ship Guerrero

History : Cities That Made History

History : Ebony: The Last Years Of The Atlantic Slave Trade

History : Pioneering The American Frontier

History : The Voynich Code

History : Capitulation

History : The Great East Japan Earthquake And Tsunami

History : Charles Lindbergh In Color

History : Fukushima: Five Years Later

History : Greek Myths True Stories

History : The Gettysburg Story

History : Curious Minds: Photojournalism

History : Art Of America

History : The Temple Mount

History : Birth Of The Internet

History : Viking Women

History : Making Money In The 21st Century

History : The Gaudi Code

History : Pyramid: Beyond Imagination

History : Waterloo: Hidden Traces

History : Games On The Battlefield

History : Around The World In 80 Treasures

History : William The Conqueror

History : The Spiral

History : The Power Of Choice

History : Battle Of Kings: Bannockburn

History : The Shakespeare Enigma

History : Steve Backshall's Extreme River Challenge

History : David And The Death Of Marat (English subtitles)

History : Project Petroglyph

History : Curious Minds: Terrorism

History : Henry V: Leader For The Ages

History : Curious Minds: Espionage

History : Air Racers

Technology : Battery Powered Homes

Technology : Masters Of Time: Independent Watchmakers

Technology : Stradivarius: Mysteries Of The Supreme Violin

Technology : The Streamliner Case - Recreating The Mercedes-Benz 540K

Technology : The End of Memory

Technology : Cities Of Tomorrow

Technology : DARPA Robotics Challenge

Technology : Love In Action

Technology : Digital Memory Gatekeepers

Technology : Curious Minds: Social Networking

Technology : Curious Minds: Entrepreneurs

Technology : Meltdown: Analyzing the Radiation Leaks

Technology : Decommissioning Fukushima: The Battle to Contain Radioactivity

Technology : Eyes Wide Open: VR Journalism

Nature : Red Panda: World's Cutest Animal

Nature : Wild Italy

Nature : Nature's Palace

Nature : On The Trail Of The Fox (English subtitles)

Nature : Great Minds Of Design

Civilization : In Love With The Samurai Sword

Civilization : Frankenstein and the Vampyre - A Dark and Stormy Night

Civilization : The Secret Life Of Your Clothes

Civilization : First Ascent

Civilization : Sex, Death And The Meaning Of Life

Civilization : Master Of Wine

Civilization : Conscious Capitalism

Civilization : Curious Minds: Philosophy

Civilization : Curious Minds: Education

Human Spirit : Charles Yang Performances

Human Spirit : Shakespeare And Us

Human Spirit : Escher's Infinite Perspective

Human Spirit : Behind The Artist

Human Spirit : Curious Minds: Music

Human Spirit : Music Moves Our Souls

Human Spirit : The Man Who Murdered Sherlock Holmes

Human Spirit : Curious Minds: Shakespeare

Human Spirit : Hooked On Food


Mar 21, 2018

Where can I see the shows of the CuriosityStream for free?

Yes, they have a free trial for (I believe) 7 -days. You do need to enter a credit card but it’s not billed unless you overshoot the trial period.


Mar 22, 2018

Which cigarettes is less harmful?

A bunch of cigarette companies tried to float the notion of less harmful “light” and “ultralight” cigarettes, but the FDA forced them to stop using those terms or claiming any harm reduction.

It wasn’t just the FDA being prickly, there was real science to back up their objections. The ‘light’ cigarettes did indeed produce fewer carcinogens and nicotine when attached to test equipment. This equipment was just basically an air pump which drew smoke from the cigarette and then analyzed that smoke.

The most typical device employed by tobacco companies was to put tiny holes in the paper, usually around the filter, in order that fresh air gets pulled in and dilutes the smoke. This caused the machine to register lower levels of harmful compounds.

But a human doesn’t smoke like a machine does. An addicted smoke is very sensitive to the precise level of nicotine in their blood. They will change the way they smoke to compensate : A bigger drag, inhaled more deeply, and held in longer to compensate. They’ll do whatever it takes to bring their nicotine intake to within a few percent of what they’re used to.

A lot of folks - often unconsciously - learn to cover the holes with their fingers or lips to defeat the ‘light’ mechanism altogether.

Long story short - such cigarettes extend the life of test equipment, but manifest zero benefit for human smokers.


Mar 22, 2018

Would you be more willing to contribute to knowledge networks such as Quora if you received monetary reward for the amount of upvotes you receive?

No, Quora gives me an audience for answering anything I damn well please, in whatever way I damn well please to (within policy.)

This freedom makes the creative act of writing here an end unto itself. I’m motivated solely by the fact that people take time out of their day to read something I’ve written.

A pay-for-play site like you suggest, would serve an entirely different purpose. I’d be willing to write for such a site, if the questions were technical, requiring deep expertise and lots of composition to put together. Like code or math questions.

I’m not likely to write such answers on Quora because they are rather arduous to compose and have a very limited audience.

Such a site wouldn’t pull me away from Quora, but it might induce me to come over and write some more technical stuff that otherwise I wouldn’t write at all.


Mar 22, 2018

Why is my 3-month-old puppy biting us so much? He plays with his toys but he latches onto our hands and won’t let go. Could it be teething? If so, what can you give him? He has not been vaccinated yet. Vet will see him on Saturday for his shots.

To a dog, the mouth corresponds to our hand. It is how they interact with the world. So they’ll use it on everything, including you.

Puppies don’t naturally understand that humans have no fur and even the slightest bite is painful. So you need to teach your puppy “bite-restraint.”

You aren’t trying to teach them to never use their mouths - that’s dangerous. A dog taught to never touch a human with his teeth as a puppy is at risk of momentarily forgetting as an adult, quickly biting someone and seriously hurting them.

Rather, you want to teach your puppy to touch your skin ever so gently with their teeth. Restraint. To do this, you should emulate the language they understand - the language of other puppies.

Next time your pup chomps on you, let out a high pitch whimper. He instinctively understands that as pain. Then cross your arms, turn your back to him, and refuse to engage with him for a few minutes. (No longer is needed, he won’t make the connection after a few minutes.) He will now understand he has upset you.

This is how his natural playmate - a fellow pup - would respond.

Keep it up. One day soon he should connect the dots and amaze you with his bite-restraint.

Oh - and keep a treat handy. The first time he demonstrates his bite restraint, lavish him with praise and a treat. Keep up the positive reinforcement too and he’ll learn faster.


Mar 23, 2018

Is it bad idea to develop Python application on Windows 10?

Not at all!

I mean - being on Windows for any reason is Bad for your eternal soul, and I would like the chance to convert you to Ubuntu - but your python skills will port to any other platform without a bump.

Might I recommend the IDE PyCharm? PyCharm: Python IDE for Professional Developers by JetBrains

It works great on Windows, provides a nice debugger, editor with command completion (saves a lot of looking things up), as well as a clean way to import any packages you might need.

If you need to make a simple GUI, I’d recommend the TkInter - Python Wiki package which enables you to create graphical apps on Windows that port to other platforms.

Also - the PyInstaller program that is already included in your Python interpreter creates single .exe files which package your program up with all the dependencies it needs so you can deploy it to other users.

And, if you ever find some time on your hands, Ubuntu can be set up dual boot on your Windows machine, keeping all your Windows stuff. Just, yanno, to take her for a spin - no commitments. Mint is my favorite flavor … Main Page - Linux Mint.

No pressure.


Mar 23, 2018

Does a talented software engineer who helps to launch MY idea deserve a PERCENTAGE of the company (like a Partner) or a FLAT FEE for their expertise?

Your idea probably sucks.

No offense - all the greats started that way.

Facebook was a closed system that only worked within Harvard.

Google was a scholastic index which searched up the most heavily cited research.

Craigs-list was a bulletin board for local events.

But the founders of all these companies were programmers. And that gave them the magic ability to pivot.

The initial idea was just a place to start from, what they all did really well was watch people react to the idea, integrate that with their own technical knowledge of what was easy to do next, what the existing landscape of competitors was, and turn on a dime.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be a programmer to lead a great company. But you should get in really tight with somebody who is. Somebody you talk to at 3 AM, agonize over decisions with, fight with - and lose some of those fights.

Any idiot can plot a course across the Atlantic. It’s the sailing that counts. The storms. The broken mast. Seeing an island paradise in the distance and throwing the original plan overboard.

As for who deserves what - well, watch out that you don’t become ballast.


Mar 24, 2018

If Hitler advocated for gun control, then why are you still pro-gun control?

Hitler also advocated for animal rights, public highways, and tobacco restrictions.

You can’t even trust a homicidal mad-man to be always wrong; you’ll just have to think for yourself.


Mar 24, 2018

How do I think more critically about new information that I consume when I don't know enough about the topic itself?

I think the key to critical thinking is to “interrogate” every view you come into.

Especially the ones you hold to be true. For example. take the Flat Earther’s. They say the Earth is flat, and it’s a global conspiracy to conceal that fact.

Now, you and I know this to be non-sense, but let’s interrogate that view. I mean, really attack it. How do we know? Because we’ve been told?

What is the actual evidence directly available to us? Let’s go about trying to prove the earth is flat. How might we do that?

I just paused for a minute, and tried to come up with something. A laser pointer is just a few bucks, we could pick one up at staples. We could set up an experiment in the desert somewhere, put it on top of a ladder, use a level to make sure it’s resting perfect flat, and travel some miles from it to measure it. (We’d have to be a bit more careful about making it truly level, but whatever.)

Of course, we wouldn’t have to travel that far to see that the height is increasing.

Now, we could do that experiment, but it might to enough to recognize how easily we could. If indeed there was a global conspiracy to convince us the world is round, that conspiracy would be busted by a simple experiment you can perform for about just a few bucks.

They key thing is we allowed ourselves to doubt a deeply held belief. Doubt is the key to critical thinking. It’s all the more important to apply not to things that offend us, but quite the opposite - to our firmest beliefs, and those beliefs that reinforce our philosophy.

Is there really a gender wage gap?

Is climate change being induced by humans?

Did we really land on the moon?

Try to answer, for yourself, both Yes and No to these questions.

How would you, yourself, come to these conclusions?

I don’t know the right answers, but I am certain these are the right questions.


Mar 25, 2018

How do people who answer questions on Quora find out who asked the question? I've noticed responses addressed to the specific person or to anonymous, but I can't see the same information.

I wrote a browser plug-in to do that, ominax.com/qure. For this question, it shows in the feed as

Otherwise you can check the edit log for that question - right hand column, under Question Stats, hit edits and scroll to the bottom to find the original asker.


Mar 25, 2018

Can a lawyer who quits representing a client be called on to testify about things he knew during his representation?

No - attorney-client privilege is binding for all time, and belongs to the client, not the attorney.

That is, the attorney would need the client’s permission.


Mar 25, 2018

Could I put water in a vape pen?

Yes, you will zorch your coil and possibly other circuitry.

Water has a much lower boiling point (100 C) than the primary components of vaping fluid - Propylene Glycol (188 C) and Vegetable Glycerine (280 C).

Your coil reaches very high temperatures, and this causes the water to boil so energetically that the coil gets surrounded with water vapor bubbles, can’t dissipate its heat, and overheats.

You’ve also changed the conductivity, but you get the idea.


Mar 26, 2018

Mine ended 2/28 I have over 460k views and over 500 followers on Quora. On the 25th I got 104,676 views. I think my questions were very interesting and thought-provoking and I was wondering if I could be a part of Quora's paid trial program again?

Paid trial program ?


Mar 26, 2018

Is there any browser emulator software for web development? Something that can emulate different browsers and versions quickly.

BrowserStack offers up a very comprehensive suite of multi-browser test services.

Cross Browser Testing Tool. 1000+ Browsers, Mobile, Real IE.


Mar 27, 2018

Is it unconstitutional, discriminatory and race baiting to run "a Muslim-free America campaign" as a candidate for president United States 2020?

It’s Consitutional, it certainly is discriminatory on the face of it, but not race-baiting since Islam isn’t a race per se.

It would also be a profoundly un-American thing to do - but hey, if somebody wants to give it a shot I’d be happy to sit back and watch it collapse under an avalanche of derision.

The first settlers came to America for freedom of religion, those roots run all the way down to the foundation.


Mar 27, 2018

What is 4+8+\underbrace{\cdots}_{Sequence}+23+42?

There’s not enough information here to fill in the sequence, one could invent a half-dozen equally plausible and simple possibilities.


Mar 28, 2018

If the United States dropped a 1 quintillion megaton nuclear bomb on North Korea, how would the rest of the world react?

There wouldn’t be a single living cell left to react. Nor planet left to stand on.

The meteor impact at Chicxlub 65 million years ago released 10 Million megatons of energy.

This killed off the dinosaurs - setting off the fifth Mass Extinction. The lower atmosphere reached ~ 300 degrees (F), killing anything not underground, under water, or in some kind of shelter.

You ask about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Megatons. That’s 18 zeros. Taking 1/100 of that gives us 1E16 Megatons.

We did have an event on earth, deep in its past, that released that much energy. It was the collision of a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which smashed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago. (Thanks to Joseph Boyle for approximating the energy of this impact here What was the total amount of energy released in the Theia impact?)

Talk about bang :

If anything was alive anywhere on or under earth, it was incinerated in the wake of this impact. The Earth’s crust turned molten, the axis of rotation was knocked off-center (giving us our seasons), and so much crap was ejected into space that it later formed the moon.

Right after the impact, the earth even lost its spherical shape. Computer simulation of Theia impact :

So your proposal is to hit with earth with 100 times this energy in one blow. It becomes clear that this would blast the planet to shreds which would fly off at escape velocity, never to return.


Mar 28, 2018

If North Korea and the United States come to an agreement on denuclearization, by having American troops leave, could the North use it to over run the South?

Yes, this is why the US would never evacuate the DMZ, even under nuclear threat from NK.


Mar 29, 2018

Why did masses of Europeans celebrate the coming World War 1 in August 1914? Even Intellectuals and artists participated with enthusiasm. What went through their heads?

Everybody thought they would win.

Nobody imagined the outcome that awaited them :

They would all lose.


Mar 30, 2018

How do I compile a Python application written in many .py files into one binary file that can I execute to run my application?

PyInstaller (Welcome to PyInstaller official website) does this. It also makes sure to wrap up any dependencies, so you don’t have to worry about libraries being present on the target machine.

On Windows, it’s already part of the installation, see C:\Python*.*\scripts\pyinstaller.

On Unix,

sudo pip install pyinstaller


Mar 30, 2018

Can someone help me with a Python program to recognize an adverbial phrase in a sentence?

That’s a meaty problem you’ve got hold of.

Here’s a good direction to move in : Natural Language Toolkit

Here’s a tutorial on PyNLK : NLP Tutorial Using Python NLTK (Simple Examples) - Like Geeks


Mar 31, 2018

What is the meaning of life to you? You can approach it in any way you like.

Create. Make stuff.

I don’t know … what’s going on. What we’re all doing here. I don’t believe God wrote in your book, or anybody else’s.

But I know a couple simple things. And they seem to very compelling clues.

First there was nothing. Then - *bang* - an unimaginably intense flash of light.

Some time later, somehow, I came into existence.

I take that as a very unsubtle hint that something is better than nothing. That I should go try to create things.

Look! I just made a post!

It’s no burst of light. But I’ll just let it be.


Apr 1, 2018

When you create an Ubuntu server, for instance on AWS EC2, is it the same as installing the software on your own computer?

Yes, it’s the same process. Last time I did it, you can get EC2 set up w/ Ubuntu Server which comes with a LAMP stack and all the related goodies, so extra installs are minimum.

But yea, it’s the same process. You will have to take some extra time to open up the right ports; AWS locks that stuff down and you have to explicitly open the ones you need.


Apr 2, 2018

Was Joseph Stalin considered to be a nice person by the people in his inner circle or was he hated by most of them?

Stalin had virtually everyone in his inner circle killed, due to a personality so paranoid that Lenin once sent a psychiatrist to investigate . The psychiatrist diagnosed Stalin as “paranoic.”

Stalin killed him the same day.


Apr 2, 2018

Can vaping cause a false positive for alcohol on a breathalyzer?

Yes, I don’t drink but borrowed a breathalyzer.

My BAC showed up as 0.03 right after vaping, dropping steadily to 0.00 over 15 minutes.

If you had a glass or two of wine with dinner, vaping on the way home could put you over the legal limit. You should probably mention the vaping thing to the cop if this happens to you, and ask to take it again in 15 minutes.


Apr 3, 2018

My boyfriend filmed me having a meltdown without my knowledge and won't delete it. What do I do? I'm scared he will show our therapist.

From my own experience, the times we are most unwilling to look at ourselves are the times when it is most important that we do.

Covering another's ears is no substitute for covering your mouth.


Apr 4, 2018

Why do people say "good for you" instead of "good" or "that's great!"?

It's kind of nuanced, "good for you" carries a recognition of your courage, discipline, or ability to overcome a handicap.

"I won 500 bucks on a scratch-off ticket"

"That's great!"

"I quit smoking a month ago."

"Good for you!"


Apr 4, 2018

What was the most intellectual year of Albert Einstein?

Probably 1905, dubbed Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis (Miraculous Year.)

He published four papers, each of which shook physics to its foundation - any one of which would have made him famous.

The first defined light as discrete packets, and described the photo-electric effect. Here the groundwork for quantum physics is laid, as Einstein proposes that energy changes in discontinuous jumps.

The second discusses heat, and asserts heat is the random motion of gas molecules. (The existence of atoms itself was still in doubt in 1905). This paper convinced a lot of doubtful scientists that atoms were indeed a thing and the field of statistical mechanics was needed to understand them.

The third introduces Special Relativity, which I trust needs no introduction.

The fourth is kind of an addendum to Special Relativity - Einstein closes out his miracle year with e=mc^2.

You ask about his greatest year - so 1905 is my toast. His greatest achievement, in my estimation, is General Relativity, which unites gravity with Special Relativity, giving the structure of space-time on a cosmic scale. What’s amazing is this seemed a pretty good thing to try to do next; Einstein had published Special Relativity - essentially throwing down the gauntlet to the entire world - “you can try too.”

It took ten years, but he won that race.

He spent most of the rest of his life trying to disprove Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (or to account for it in some essentially non probabilistic way.)

Nothing came of it. It’s hard to be rough on Einstein, though. He’s had the very strange experience of seeing more deeply into nature than any other person. He had no option but to trust his intuition.


Apr 6, 2018

I'm looking to stop smoking and start vaping. What things should I look at in a starter kit?

I would recommend a “Nicotine salt” system, similar to the Juul but much, much cheaper. The salt-based system delivers a sharper nicotine hit, more closely simulating a cigarette. Inexpensive, refillable, no settings to mess with, just toke and go.

I use this, it’s available everywhere online for 25 bucks.

Next, buy some liquid for it - but make sure it is salt-based. Strawberry-taffy seems universally popular :

Mr. Salt E-Strawmelon Taffy E-Liquid 30ml

Down the road you’ll need replacement coils, and you can save a ton of money by mixing your own ‘juice’. Message me for help if you want.


Apr 6, 2018

My girlfriend and I have been dating for 8 months. Her family is much wealthier than mine. She wants me to sign a “dating” prenup because of the gifts she gives me. Is this normal?

You’re either making this question up, or she is making some ham-fisted attempt to remind you of her family’s wealth.

Is it normal? No - more to the point, it’s meaningless. Gifts and dating incur no obligations, expectations or anything else that could result in a claim against her family’s wealth.

As “friends of the court”, most lawyers offer the courtesy of a quick consult over the phone. I would get her on the line, call 3 different ones. You will hear 3 bursts of laughter.

This is a small red flag as well that - her family is not at all wealthy. (She clearly isn’t getting professional legal advice.) Which means she’s lying. And maybe litigious.


Apr 8, 2018

Do scientists ever look at evolution from a creationist viewpoint? If not, why not? Shouldn't evidence be looked at from all sides?

Yes, some very important work is going on regarding the origin of life.

Not many people talk about it because the origin of life is such a hot-button issue that both camps have polarized into unthinking, counterfactual tribalism.

The Creationists point to their Bible, or to Intelligent Design, or gaps in the evolutionary record, and say life must have been designed by a great sentience, it could not arise out of nature. Which is nonsense, and most people see it that way.

The “Scientists” I’ll spend more time on, because they are equally full of shit but lean on the authority of science. Sure - we see evolution occurring, we can track DNA back through the tree of life. But the inception of life itself? Put simply, a DNA helix surrounded by some kind of protocell, capable of dividing - how did that happen?

The scientist rightfully eschews divine intervention and claims the thing self-assembled as a matter of luck. Fair enough.

But this raises the question - what is the probability of that happening? Most scientists, including famous physicists and populizers, insist that given the right conditions on a planet, the probability is pretty good.

And they offer no explanation whatsoever for this conclusion. Their hand-waving becomes ever more animated when they insist a planet has a really long time, and so many molecules bouncing around, that a self-replicating proto-cell is just bound to emerge.

They can’t tell us the structure of that cell, suggest the ways it may spontaneously self assemble, or calculate for us any probabilities.

They cannot point to a second or third inception of life on Earth; all known life on Earth hails from the same lineage.

They cannot recreate this proto-cell in a lab deliberately.

They can’t point to alien life on an exoplanet. But they insist this must exist, because there are so damn many stars with planets, so many galaxies. More handwaving.

There has to be some probability, call it P-life, that life will arise on a suitable planet. And we have no idea - none! - what P-life is. It could be 1/100, and then the Drake equation does indicate the cosmos is teaming with life. it could be 0.000 … 1 with 70 billion zeroes before the ‘1’.

Forget about life occurring on a given planet, it could be that life occurring anywhere within a Cosmos is very remote , that life is a more exotic event than the big bang.

If life is indeed that rare, we may consider it “miraculous” in some sense. Not expected to happen but happened anyway. There may have been 10 million Big Bangs, and only one gave rise to life which became curious about its origins. Perhaps we can call this “Rational Creationism.”

And the people doing real research work on the molecular origins of life have to consider Rational Creationism, at least as null hypothesis. They have to stay out of the reactionary hand-waving between the religious creationists and the anti-creationists, both of whom claim to know what P-life is.

A number of them are making very exciting progress in their search for a proto-cell, One promising theory is that of the RNA world - Wikipedia which considers a simpler origin of single-chain RNA rather than 2-chained DNA.

We may discover that alien life is overwhelmingly likely to exist not from a signal from space, but from a proto-cell we incepted from scratch, which gives us a rough P-life.

Or we might someday discover that we are likely alone. That our existence is improbable to such an extreme that the world ‘miraculous’ may apply.

We can’t find answers unless we raise questions; we can’t raise questions if we cling to notions of what must be.


Apr 11, 2018

What do you think about the disrespect spoken about the President of the United States, Donald Trump?

We’re rebels.

We don’t defer to authority. We challenge, defy and insult it.

We’ve been flipping the bird to whoever’s in charge since 1776.

“You can’t fight city hall. But you can sure as hell burn it down.” — Proverb from pre-revolution American colonies.


Apr 12, 2018

If “white pride” isn’t rooted in white supremacy, what is it about being white that you’re proud of?

Well, white skin has recently been discovered to be a result of interbreeding with Neanderthal, which is pretty mind blowing and cool (to me, anyway).

And kind of ironic given all the early 20th century idiocy about “racial purity” - turns out white folks are the real genetic hominid “mutts”.


Apr 13, 2018

Is short-term JUULing bad?

Yea, nicotine addiction is a real monster. Unfortunately, a lot of high-school and university students are experimenting with nicotine for the first time using a JUUL.

Doing this is playing Russian Roulette, if you’re predisposed to nicotine addiction, a few weeks of JUULing can trigger an addiction that may haunt you for years, decades, or even a lifetime.

For smokers, I’m very bullish on vaping for harm reduction. For people who are nicotine free - new recruits are not welcome.

It’s been a long and slow climb to stamp out nicotine addiction. I’m still an addict after 35+ years, after finally being able to switch from cigarettes to vaping.

We nicotine junkies don’t want your sympathy. We know we should have known better. We aren’t asking your donation either. We ask only one thing :

Don’t add to the problem by joining us.


Apr 15, 2018

Does white privilege exist? If so, what is it?

No. But racism does. The language of “privilege” is a misdirection that serves to perpetuate racism rather than counter it.

To take a specific example, suppose a company doesn’t give equal consideration to the résumés of minorities. So we have racist action by the HR department, and we have victims of that racism - every minority job applicant.

To speak of “white privilege” diverts our focus from the racist and the victim. It redirects our attention to the thousands of bystanders who just happened to be white and applying for the same job.

This enables the self-avowed “activist” to cast a much broader net. They accuse not that Hiring Manager, nor that company, but rather all the white applicants, and all companies. Now, the “activist” has an entire race of people from which to demand concessions.

There is a horrific problem with this. Nobody did anything about the racist act.

Consider this study, which Feifei Wang offers in her (much different) answer.

http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening MS R2 Accepted.pdf

I read it. Cover to cover. It’s shocking. Identical resumes were sent to some very big companies. All were from minorities, but some were “whitened” to appear to be from white people. The whitened resumes got call-backs for interviews at about twice the rate as minorities.

Is that privilege? No - that’s racism! And what do we do about it? We call the fucking cops! The Equal Opportunity Act of 1972 provides legal remedy at the federal level for this racist act.

But get this : That study … doesn’t bother to give the company names. Just left all that out. Maybe they figured - they made their point about privilege. Got their name in the news. Looking good for that tenure review. Mission accomplished.

And that’s the problem with the idea of ‘privilege’. People get so caught up posturing that nobody even thinks to take action.

So, don’t talk to me about privilege. Be an activist.

Give me those names.


Apr 18, 2018

Why do people routinely rank Newton and Einstein among history's most indispensable minds when the things they discovered would have just been discovered later by others? Aren't artists like Shakespeare and Beethoven more irreplaceable and honorable?

I think that’s comparing apples to quaternions.

Beethoven made something that in ten million years no other human would make.

Einstein discovered something that in ten million years every other human will still know.

Both are eternal in very different ways.


Apr 18, 2018

Is a man a pervert if he instinctively looks at a woman's chest area?

Seven years ago, I was interviewing for a job at one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

My second interview was with a woman. She had … an ample bosom. And was wearing a low cut shirt that elegantly showcased her cleavage.

She asked me to try to innovate an idea on the spot for a movie-watching app. I added a social element, “watch with friends”, and sketched it on the white board. She liked it.

I then sat back at the table across from her. She was checking her notes, and my eyes unwittingly drifted down to her cleavage.

She looked back at me. I looked up to her eyes.

I was busted. During an interview. I felt ashamed and frustrated at myself.

She just kept going like nothing happened. Asked me how I might architect a web browser.

She gave me a thumbs up, and I got the job. Six months in, there was a re-org and I became her direct-report.

In her mind anyway, a straight man who looks at a woman’s chest isn’t a pervert. He’s just a guy who, like them all, needs to exert effort to keep his basic instincts in check.


Apr 18, 2018

I saw a Clockwork Orange. I think that everything that happened to Alex was his own fault. What I read about what it was going for only made me hate it even more. I am missing something? This movie’s theme just seem to fall flat for me.

Everything that happened to Alex was his own fault, and he deserved it - and more.

My interpretation of the film/book is that it’s an attack on Christianity. At least the brand of Christianity (recently disavowed by the Pope) that warns a sinner will suffer eternally in Hell.

Burgess is showing how that a conditioned response - punishment and reward - can induce moral behavior but not true morality.

Alex is being conditioned to become physically sick at the sight of violence. He is being programmed, like a machine.

But he’s not a machine, he’s a creature of nature, endowed with a mysterious sentience. In an attempt to mechanize the organic, they have created a “clockwork orange”.

Alex never got to glimpse - or possess - true morality. We see his first stirring of morality during his conditioning, when he is being forced to watch films of violence. His favorite piece from Beethoven just happened to be the sound-track.

Struck by the discord of exhaltant music with obscene violence, he declares,

“But sirs, misses, I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against society!”

The doctors wave him off and assure that they have the situation well in hand, extinguishing this first spark of virtue.

Later, we hear a priest warn of the fate due to a sinner,

“I have been informed in visions
That there is a place darker than any prison
Hotter than any flame of human fire
Where souls of unrepentant criminal sinners like yourselves
I say, like yourselves
Scream in endless and unendurable agony”

Burgess doesn’t care about Alex - rapist and murderer. But he cares about us, that by acting in our pure self-interest to avoid pain and fear we lack true morality. That avoiding crime for fear of punishment, or sin for fear of damnation, produces only a mechanical facsimile of morality. Burgess wants us not to be a clockwork orange, but a true orange, a natural being who embraces morality naturally.

As one who lives by the words :

“Virtue is its own reward.” — Marcus Cicero, ~60 AD

Apr 18, 2018

What is the theme of A Clockwork Orange? (1971 movie)

I see the film/book as an attack on Christianity. At least the brand of Christianity (recently disavowed by the Pope) that warns a sinner will suffer eternally in Hell.

Burgess is showing that a conditioned response - punishment and reward - can induce moral behavior but not true morality.

Alex is being conditioned to become physically sick at the sight of violence. He is being programmed, like a machine. But he’s not a machine, he’s a creature of nature, endowed with a mysterious sentience. In an attempt to mechanize the organic, they have created a “clockwork orange”.

Alex never gets to possess true morality. We see the first stirring of morality during his conditioning, when he is being forced to watch films of violence. His favorite piece from Beethoven happens to be the sound-track. Struck by the discord of exultant music with the most profane violence, he declares,

“But sirs, misses, I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's, like, against society!”

The doctors wave him off and continue the treatment, extinguishing this first spark of virtue.

Later, we hear a priest warn of the fate due to a sinner,

“I have been informed in visions that there is a place darker than any prison!
Hotter than any flame of human fire!
Where souls of unrepentant criminal sinners like yourselves, I say, like yourselves,
scream in endless and unendurable agony!”

Burgess doesn’t care about Alex - rapist and murderer. But he cares about us, that acting in our pure self-interest deprives of us of true virtue. That avoiding crime for fear of punishment, or sin for fear of damnation, produces only a mechanical facsimile of morality.

Burgess wants us not to be a clockwork orange, but a true orange, a natural being who embraces morality naturally. Burgess is reminding of us an ancient maxim :

“Virtue is its own reward.” — Marcus Cicero, ~60 AD


Apr 19, 2018

If I try to push a nail into the wall with maximum force, it does not penetrate. Hit its head with lesser force, it goes into the wall. Why does lesser force affect more?

This is the phenomenom of shock.

When you push against a nail with all your strength, you are imparting some energy as the nail slowly pushes molecules around it out of the way. Even though you’re pushing hard, not much energy gets imparted as the wood mostly doesn’t yield, while a little bit does move. The board and nail also heat up slightly.

As you swing the hammer, it’s free to move. So it stores up kinetic energy as you accelerate it. When it strikes the nail, all that energy is released in a millisecond.

So you’ve come at the nail with more energy, but more importantly, you’ve compressed that energy more than 1000x into a millisecond. The force applied during that impact becomes very high. (Consider a billiard ball instead, during the brief collision, the second ball acquires kinetic energy = 1/2 m v^2 in a very short time. It accelerates to v very quickly, so the force f=m a is large during the impact.)

As an analogy, if you try to open the bottle-cap by lightly twisting for an hour you’ll get nowhere. But 1/10 second of a hard twist gets the job done. There’s a threshold of force at which ‘static friction’ is overcome and things get moving.


Apr 20, 2018

Why do you feel it is necessary to edit others’ answers? Did it never occur to you that some words are used for effect?

I’ve been on Quora since the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

I’ve been the grateful recipient of many edit-suggestions, easily over 500.

Not one has been a stylistic suggestion; all were grammar, spelling, or factual corrections. 98% of them were correct.


Apr 21, 2018

What will happen when Hillary Clinton runs for office again?

I don't think there's any possibility she could win the Democratic nomination. She lost to the weakest, most unhinged candidate ever.

For Hillary, it's over.


Apr 21, 2018

What do programmers think of Bubble (no-code app creator)?

I’ve never seen it, but I can tell you all about it.

I have been coding since the days of tele-type; there was no monitor, rather, you’d work on this running scroll of paper spewing out of a printer.

And I have seen dozens of incantations of “Introducing the WonderSplotch, which empowers you to [some code-y thing] without coding!”

It is always, always a lie. Coding is time-consuming and expensive, so this pitch catches the eye of non-coding suit types and detaches them from their money.

Did you know that the ‘Visual’ in Visual basic was intended to mean that Microsoft was building a super non-code Basic where you could drag, drop, and arrange magic beavers or something to create your program?

Yea, that didn’t happen. They kept the name because, well, Basic does use your eyes so technically it’s Visual.

But the WonderSplotch and all its cousins aren’t a total scam. They are actually an incredibly useful tool for developers. They quickly create the outer frame-work of the program, saving the coder a lot of time.

The most common example of this is any graphical GUI builder, like Python’s Page software. You can throw together the general layout of your windows in minutes.

Once you’ve done that, the Page tool is now in the way as you need to make these graphical bits work together. So you use Page for 45 minutes, grab that code base, and spend a week coding out the application. You shaved maybe 25% off your development time with that head start.

And this is how it is for all such tools. You can’t create an iPhone app that works any way you want without writing code. Such a tool would require a major break-through in AI.

So I can tell you, without even glancing at Bubble, that it’s another WonderSplotch. The honest pitch is “saves developers some time.”

The marketing is a “bait-and-switch”, which actually backfires on the marketers. Because it’s developers who will make use of their tool. By targeting non-developers, they are deliberately avoiding the actual user- base, ensuring that no one who buys it is happy, and no one who needs it will buy it.


Apr 21, 2018

Who will be remembered for the longest time in history: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, the Google founders or Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs.

Fame is about stories. For all our advances in technology, we pass on knowledge of the past the same way as when we gathered around a fire at night.

We tell stories. It doesn’t matter at all if they are true, they serve to keep the memory of people alive.

Isaac Newton : Apple hits him on the head. (Never happened.)

Ben Franklin : Flew a kite in a lightening storm to prove it was electricity. (Totally made up.)

Napolean : Short guy who overcompensated with dreams of conquest. (Average height.)

Hitler : One testicle. (Two.)

Stories help us remember, and can act as a barometer of what will be remembered.

Quick : Tell me a Steve Jobs story. I have a dozen, here’s one : First iPod prototype is shown to him, he insists they make it smaller. Engineers object they cannot. Jobs tosses iPod into fish tank, air bubbles come up. “There’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

I have no idea if it’s true. That doesn’t matter.

Now tell me a Gates story. Quickly, no thinking. And now for Musk, Bezos, the Google guys.

Me neither. Nothing worth sharing at a party.

The stories we tell reveal our collective memory in formation.


Apr 21, 2018

Are private blockchains useless? They will have a small number of nodes for verification and will easily be editable. How is this more secure and better than a normal database?

Private blockchains aren’t useless, they’re meaningless. It’s a con job to get companies to pay for software they already have.

Shared databases with corporate key-holders already exist. All sorts of schemes like ring signatures so that multiple people - even hostile competitors - have to jointly validate data already exist, and have for decades.

Your company already paid for it. A lot.

The blockchain is different. It removes the need for any keyholder by creating a global computing race. Every 10 minutes or so the combined miners of the world mint a block. We know the block is valid because no computer, company, or government can compute a block that quickly. Too many miners who are being paid a bounty.

We have to keep the race going, so we can’t pause after 10 minutes, all the miners start to compute the next block. This new block will be the only accepted successor to the current block. The blocks form a chain. (A black-hat could, after all, get lucky and mint a block faster than the combined miners. But they won’t get that lucky twice in a row.)

In terms of resources - electricity, computer hardware, this is the most wasteful, slow, and costly way to share and publish data. That is deliberate.

We have expended all that electricity and CPU power for one and only one purpose : To create a system where we don’t need a custodian - we trust the data because we’ve made it impossibly expensive to crack it.

To repeat : Block-chain spends billions to do away with any human stewardship.

To spend all that, and then add human stewardship back in is like flying the Space Shuttle from New York to Boston. Yes, it’s possible. It’s also utterly absurd.

Even more absurd is the con man who sells you a sticker that says : “Local Shuttle 2.0” to put on your existing passenger jet.

I’m looking at you, Accenture.


Apr 22, 2018

When I opened Visual Basic 2010 Express today, it started asking me for a Microsoft registration code to continue. I clicked on the link, entered my details, and then Microsoft’s website said the URL couldn’t be found. What do I do?

New England keeps good records, going way back to before the Revolutionary War. That’s mostly because churches recorded weddings and births, and towns recorded people disembarking from ships as they arrived in the New World.

I got curious one day, and starting web-searching my heritage. Slogged through generation after generation, I finally got back to my ancestor. a man named John Waddham.

He came on the 800th ship or so headed for the New World, in 1638. He was part of a wave of British emigration who set sail into the unknown in order to enjoy the freedom to practice religion of their choice.

He settled in the Connecticut Colony - the very first group of settlers to set down roots there, along with 60 others.

He became a simple pig farmer, met his wife, raised children, and never returned to his native England.

When I searched my geneology, I wasn’t looking for famous people, or royalty - as many people are tempted to do. I was looking for someone like Waddham.

He left his livelihood behind, everything and everyone he knew - in pursuit of a new life in a new world. All for the sake of freedom.

Had he not done so, I would not be writing this.

As to your problem with Visual Basic registration - maybe this is Destiny’s calling. Leave Microsoft. I know it isn’t easy. But fortune favors the bold.

Waddham would tell you - and as his descendant that duty now falls to me :

“Set sail for Linux and never look back.”


Apr 22, 2018

When the German people failed Hitler at the end of WWII, he understood that he should rule the Russian people instead in order to achieve his goals. Should I do the same, before I get impeached?

Welcome back, Serge !


Apr 22, 2018

What is the difference between warning and errors?

Errors stop the program.

Warnings keep going, but alert you to the fact the program may do something unexpected.


Apr 23, 2018

Can we all just admit that bullying works? It’s a dirty little secret that no one wants to acknowledge. I don’t defend bullies, but I have observed enough to know that being one is a successful strategy.

Bullies appear to be winning in their interactions with people.

They’re not. The object of the bullying has two choices - the first of which is to yell back at the person. This usually isn’t possible as the bully is hiding behind some kind of authority (like, they are somebody’s boss.) This is actually an act of enormous cowardice; anyone can pick a fight with a hand-cuffed person.

The second option is what usually happens. The victim marks the person for future revenge. The victim doesn’t know how, when, or where, but simply adds the bully to their silent “shit-list” of people to harm when the opportunity presents itself.

Non-bullies never face this prospect. Imagine dozens of people, perfectly happy to help you go down in flames, and not telling you that.

Harvey Weinstein is a classic bully. So was Mussolini. As are millions of less famous examples.

I once worked with a person who was a degreed professional, and thought “mail-room people” could be treated like dirt. This person was just out of college, and quite full of themselves.

They berated the mailroom people, twice, despite some of them being twice her age and about issues really beyond their control. She could do this, because she outranked them.

They didn’t say anything back.

The next time she got a package, however, they moved it to the bottom of the pile. Then again. They would delay its delivery by a week. They kept this up.

For six years.

When I first heard the expression, repeated by Khan in Star Trek, that “revenge is a dish best served cold”, I thought it referred to being cold-hearted or something.

When I had more experience in the working world, I realized that it meant later.

The bully’s world is soaked in a cold, unseen malevolence of their own making.


Apr 23, 2018

Can you recommend a good law firm to sue Google for posting only outdated, defamatory results when people search for my name?

Heh. Any ethical attorney won’t take the case. Unethical ones might take your money, file a few forms, sit back and watch you fail.

Google doesn’t post anything. They just “index” content produced by others. They do, however, make an effort to de-list illegal content.

For one example, Google routinely removes links to pirated movies.

Don’t threaten them. They aren’t afraid of you, and that will actually slow the process way down as lawyers call each other, rack up billable hours, and create meaningless documents.

Be nice, and work through their existing support that removes content that is illegal. That bar is pretty high however. Saying bad things about you, of itself, doesn’t constitute libel.

If libel really has occurred, you should be acting against the content creator. If you can’t get that person to take it down (or a judge to compel them to do so), Google isn’t about to step in to provide a second verdict. They will err on the side of non-action.


Apr 24, 2018

Is Habib Fanny's IQ really 85 like other Africans?

I’m gonna blank the question out because disgust and outrage.


Apr 25, 2018

Why is Bitcoin's price increasing in April 2018?

When Bitcoin crossed 10K USD back in November, that round number made big press. A lot of completely new investors drove the price rapidly up to 20K, leading to wild instability with investors bailing, short-ers covering, and similar chaotic crowd behavior.

I think the new investors are either shaken off now, or just HODLing. So it’s late November again, except this time when BTC crosses 10K again it will do so without the fanfare, and continue to rise on its inexorable course to (in concert with the alts) eating the global economy.


Apr 25, 2018

Can I withdraw my cryptocurrency when prices are going down only to reinvest a few minutes or hours later?

Prices are always going down.

The price of a crypto (and most investment instruments) is less like a smooth curve and more like a fractal. It’s jumping up and down from second to seond.

So if you created a mechanism to sell whenever the price was dropping, it would fire almost instantly.

However, I get your gist. I would like to buy, say, Monero at $250. And I’d like to say, “If it falls below $230, sell. For 60 minutes, wait for it to recover to 235. If it does, buy back. After the hour is up, buy at any price over $230”.

This would protect me from being clobbered by sudden dips, but would jump back in if the dip recovers quickly.

I have some Python code to do this over Poloniex. However, I only use it for insanely large drops as a parachute. And this strategy makes a lot of assumptions about what’s going to happen, any one of which can be wrong.

Having said that, give a shout and I’d be happy to share my code w/ you.


Apr 25, 2018

My boss asked me to assemble a PC to do machine learning but I said I don't know how to assemble a PC and he felt disappointed, what's wrong with not knowing PC assembling?

I think language may have tripped things up here. There’s been a misunderstanding.

I’m going to float a guess : Your boss meant to say : Can you build a PC to do machine learning?

That is, you start with a standard desktop. Install a GPU card. Then the CUDA or OpenCL software layer.

Then the language Python, an IDE like PyCharm, and finally a Python library like PyBrain.

This isn’t something you should be expected to know now, but it’s perfectly reasonable to ask that you google your way through it.

This is necessary these days to do ML because typical office computers don’t come off-the-shelf like this. And typical virtual machines like AWS don’t have these capabilities.


Apr 25, 2018

How did OOP suddenly fall out of favor and bow down to functional programming?

OOP is a little like the weather : “Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.”

Like the weather, it’s necessary, ubiquitous, and even though it might be raining on you right now, for all its flaws it’s the only system known to work on a global scale.

Functional programming is like Latin. Knowing it makes you a much better reader and writer - you see otherwise hidden connections and have an expanded mental map of language.

But you don’t actually write in it.

So learn Latin, grab an umbrella, and don’t be afraid to mix metaphors.


Apr 25, 2018

If you believe that taxes should fund abortion, do you believe that women have the right to choose what they do to their bodies, but pro-life taxpayers don't have the right to choose whether to support what they consider to be murder?

Precisely.

Your tax dollars go wherever the government directs them to go, without your line-item consent.

I don’t want my tax dollars going to another air-craft carrier, or fighter jet. But as a tax-payer, my only recourse is at the polls.

I also don’t want Trump president.

The essential principle of Democracy is that we agree to honor the direct and indirect results of elections, especially when we don’t get what we want.


Apr 25, 2018

What tool do you need to headless automate same behaviour as Internet Explorer 8 or 11? Currently, I am using PhantomJS but the button is not showing and the script is trying to click that button. How can you set PhantomJS to emulate like IE browser?

The button is probably not visible within PhantomJS’s virtual viewport. You need to scroll down to it using javascript, and it may be necessary to use a while-loop that hangs until the element is both present and visible.

Other libraries like Selenium Browser Automation bake this sort of thing in for you.


Apr 25, 2018

What proven math fact surprised you the most when you learned it?

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem blew my freakin’ mind.

Gödel proved that proofs are broken. That mathematics contains infinitely many theorems which, although true, cannot be proven. That no effort to patch this hole is possible (*).

So, when you are searching for a proof of a theorem, first the theorem must be true, and second you have to get lucky (!?).

Our agonizingly cautious mechanism to attain certainty - axiomatic reasoning - turns out to be a total crap-shoot. This is Mathematic’s equivalent of the double-slit experiment.

A note to pedants : Yes, I am leaving a lot out by not discussing Omega-consistency, that the system must be sufficiently strong to support Gödel-numbering, etc. yada. I find myself at constant odds with academics, who insist we should say nothing unless we say everything. I counter that clarity is rooted in brevity; and brevity is the careful art of omission.


Apr 26, 2018

Was smoking as prevalent in the 60′s as depicted in Mad Men?

Yes - smoking didn’t start to go extinguished until about 1990.

In the early 80s, there was a outdoor smoking area at my high school. In between classes, the smokers would light up.

In the late 80s, in college you could smoke in the hallways of the academic buildings as well as in the dorms.


Apr 27, 2018

What are some of the best time-saving tips for Javascript?

1 - You often need to look at the entire DOM tree, after all the (client-side) JavaScript has fired. Any modern site like Quora or Facebook relies heavily on this. To get the final DOM tree, on Firefox, open Web Develop/Web Console, click Inspector, select the <body> line, then right-click Copy/OuterHTML. The entire contents of the DOM is now in your paste buffer.

2 - You often need to find an element on a web page programmatically. Browse to that page and right-click on an element of interest. For example, on this page you’re looking at right now, the Quora icon in the far upper-left, right-click and select Inspect Element. This brings up the inspector window, and here’s a really cool trick : Right click on that same line in the inspector window, and you can choose Copy CSS Selector, to give : .header_logo > a:nth-child(1)

(You can also get an XPath query to that element.)


Apr 28, 2018

Should the term "white privilege" be replaced with a softer term "advantages you didn't ask for" or something along those lines? Is white privilege too harsh of a term?

I think the term “white privilege” should be discarded. It is so corrosive to the cause of equality, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a clever racist invented it.

The non-Jewish residents of Nazi Germany didn’t enjoy “Gentile Privilege.” The Nazi government had gone murderously insane. There were a few thousand people directly responsible for that, and many of them were deservedly hanged for it.

The residents of Rwanda in 1994 did not enjoy “Hutu privilege.” Some paramilitary groups went murderously insane, and many were deservedly shot for it.

The allies did not accuse every German. The Tutsis did not accuse every Hutu.

Because to do so would be equally racist. And you can’t defeat racism by being a victorious racist.

Those who would change the very words in our head, to delete the word “right” and insert the word “privilege”, to modify the word “racist” to mean “white person in the West”, are not advocating for equality. They mean well (or so I hope), but they are trying to defeat racism by being better racists.

A great many liberals reject this; a great many black people reject it.

I’m with these people. And I don’t care what their skin color is.


Apr 28, 2018

Is amalgamating C sources into one large source file a good method to a better performing code, allowing the compiler to use a more elaborate optimization?

Not at all, the compiler grabs files as needed; dumping everything into one file lets the compiler do its job slightly faster, but the resultant executable will be the same. It’s also horrible form and your colleagues will taunt you without mercy.


Apr 29, 2018

If the war in Europe had dragged on when the A-bombs were created, would the Americans have used the bombs against Nazi Germany?

Without hesitation; Germany was the intended target since the inception of the Manhattan Project. Had the US somehow known beforehand that Germany would lose the war, we almost certainly wouldn’t have built The Bomb at all.


Apr 29, 2018

Can I download my Quora activity, meaning a file with all my answers, questions, and upvoted questions?

Ya, I made a Firefox plugin for that.

http://Ominax.com/quark

It's one-click. Known to work with >20K answers. Supports math notation. Costs nothin’. Open source.

I use the archive almost daily to do rapid searches on my content. It's probably the awesomest thing, ever.

(It doesn’t yet include Questions and Upvotes, but does fetch all your Answers.)


Apr 30, 2018

What do you think if a software developer with over 9 years experience doesn't know Linux and how to setup a server?

I would think they come from the Enterprise world, possibly a consultancy like Accenture, or a branch of the government. Not a big deal. (I’ll leave my unkind words about Enterprise culture for another answer some day.)

Big business and bureaucracies run on Windows.


Apr 30, 2018

What do Top Writers feel about the idea of a Quora Top Writer's store?

I’m McLovin’ it.

This gives the ability to replace our TW swag, gives more options, and I like the fact that it’s only open to TW’s. A little elitism makes the world go around.


May 1, 2018

If each brand had an honest slogan, what would some be?

Microsoft : It usually works.

Apple : We don’t need a slogan. You already want it.

Google : More than search. No, seriously.

Yahoo : We also do things.

SAP : Yea, we know. We’re working on it.

Amazon : Fuck everybody.

Uber : How is this legal ?

Facebook : All your consequence are unintend.


May 1, 2018

What do you think about an interviewer who said I was lying because I looked upwards before responding?

Did you a big favor. You don't usually see red flags of incompetence and hostility in a workplace during the interview.

In the real world, in places like the FBI, experts know that people look away when accessing a memory or thinking. But not always. There are no reliable, single indicators.


May 1, 2018

Did the Americans have plans of fighting the Nazis before Pearl Harbor?

Well, the American public was over 70% in favor of staying out the War.

Roosevelt and many others wanted to get into the war as soon as possible in order to win it as soon as possible. The reasons are endless; among them are that Germany was likely to attack the US (as Mein Kampf promises), the fall of the UK would be an unimaginable loss both culturally and militarily.

Roosevelt was waiting, possibly hoping either Germany or Japan would attack.

When Hitler’s bunker was over-run by the Soviets, there was a globe inside. Over North America there was a Swastika. So, good call FDR.


May 3, 2018

How would you represent a graph (nodes and edges) in Python?

A graph has a surprisingly simple structure.

Let’s number all the nodes from 1 to n.

Then we just give all the edges, like this :

[ [1,2] , [3,6] , [1,3] , [3,4 ] , … , ]

That will work, though you might want to consider using tuples instead. Since I’m guessing the OP is new to Python, I’ll skip that issue and leave the interested reader to look that stuff up elsewhere.

Now the question arises - What will you typically be doing with a graph? Well - given any node you’ll want to what node it’s connected to.

A question left to the reader is - what ‘helper’ structure can we generate from the graph in order to do these lookups very quickly? For directed graphs ?


May 4, 2018

Why are there black people in this world?

Somebody has to assume the grim duty of being your ancestor.


May 5, 2018

What does >2/dev/null do in Linux?

Discards error messages.

Error messages from a process emerge from “Standard Error”, which is stream #2. The command 2>/dev/null says to send stream 2 to /dev/null, which just consumes data and ignores it.

(In the old days, this stream was a physical connection like a printer, so you could have a printer just for error messages.)


May 5, 2018

What are some time-saving tips for a beginner programmer?

Avoid the habit of letting the Interpreter/Compiler catch your syntax errors.

It’s so easy to just type away and rely on your IDE to catch your typos. The problem with this is you don’t get in the habit of carefully reading over the code you just wrote.

While syntax errors are caught, semantic errors slip through. That 1 should be a 0. That < should be <=. That kind of thing. A “cognitive typo”.

A careful re-reading can save days of debugging.


May 6, 2018

How do I implement && feature (run several commands consecutively) of Linux shell in C?

Unix commands can be combined with a semicolon, so use the system command to invoke them like this :

#include <stdlib.h>

int status = system("gzip archive.tar *.*; cp archive.tar.gz ~/");


May 6, 2018

What do you think is the most beautiful work of architecture? It doesn't have to be famous.

What a great question!

Personally, I am drawn to a simple minimalism; a relatively small and modest structure whose utilitarian design seems to have become beautiful almost by amazing coincidence. The “Finnish Modernists” seem the best at it :

A Finnish “log cabin” :

A multi-family vacation house :

Most architects would have filled in the slope to make it level, but here they took pains not to disturb the landscape :

Notice how the roof often overhangs the structure, creating natural protection from the elements as well as a patio :

During the winter, there’s only 5 hours of daylight in southern Finland, and no sun at all in the northern lattitudes.

So when “the sun comes, like a god” - the Fins architect a broad welcome :


May 8, 2018

Do you think answers by popular Quorans and top writers should be banned or reported if they provide facts and bold claims yet fail to provide references and links to sources?

We write answers for free.

Research papers will cost you.


May 8, 2018

What would be the best approach to remove the last item (number) from a list while iterating in Python?

list.pop()


May 8, 2018

How do you define SJW (Social Justice Warrior)? My understanding is that it is a pejorative term for extreme liberals. Am I correct?

Yes, “pejorative term for extreme liberals” isn’t a bad summary of Social Justice Warrior.

To be a bit clearer, an ideological split has occurred within the Left. It hinges on a single question :

“Should we be blind to race (or gender) in thought and action?”

Classical Liberals like me say “Yes, by definition that is what it means to transcend prejudice.”

Social Justice Warriors say “No, that is to deny the experience of oppressed people.”

This simple question created a (thus far) un-crossable rift in the Left.

And to be clear, there is some name-calling going on here. My answer to the Big Question is “Yes”, so I call “No” people Social Justice Warriors. It is not intended as a compliment.

They won’t call themselves that; they consider themselves Justice Activists or something and have names they call me : Racist, possessor of White Fragility and White Privilege, un-woke plebian of the Patriarchy. (Then they usually try to ‘educate’ me by insisting I read some book which turns out to be an incoherent 3-page article mostly cribbed from Das Kapital, a real book they never heard of.)

Ahem. So, yea. It’s a rather ugly family fight at this point. We should probably stop calling each other names long enough to kick the cheeto-faced baboon out of the White House; we’re just not there yet.

(Edit : There is an interesting discussion in the comments with Gabriel Guzman here, https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-define-SJW-Social-Justice-Warrior-My-understanding-is-that-it-is-a-pejorative-term-for-extreme-liberals-Am-I-correct/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/61610124 . In it, we vent our frustrations toward each other across the old-liberal/new-liberal divide. We seem able to achieve a certain detente (warming) between the two of us, anyway. Contempt yields to disagreement and finally to minor difference. It’s probably the sort of talk more liberals should be having to patch up the generational rift.)

May 8, 2018

Does there exist a "distance from rationality" function (norm) d:\mathbb{R}\rightarrow [0,\infty) for which \phi , the golden ratio, is a global maximum?

Um.

No.


May 9, 2018

Which answer of yours is your favorite, despite having few upvotes and/or views?

For some reason, my favorite answers are mostly about movies.

This one languished around 12 upvotes for a few years, and only recently got boosted up to > 200.

My attempt to explain 2001 : A space odyssey.

Christopher Reiss's answer to What is 2001: A Space Odyssey really trying to say?

At 18 upvotes, The end of Ghost World :

Christopher Reiss's answer to What are the best bus scenes on film?

At a mere 10 upvotes,

Christopher Reiss's answer to Is Rise of the Planet of the Apes worth seeing? Why or why not?

Aside from movies, here I make an (rather unexpected, I think) appeal for the miraculous in the creation of life - Christopher Reiss's answer to Does teaching intelligent design in schools really damage science? A dozen upvotes.


May 10, 2018

I have just started coding. How can I avoid being a mediocre coder?

You’re going to go through the mediocre phase - the trick is don’t stop there or you end up mediocre, which is what I think you mean.

Fortunately, it’s easy. The same habits that got you to mediocre will carry you out of it.

Stay curious, stay hungry - even though your code works. Keep googling if there is a better way to do it. Maybe there is a different approach that is simpler and faster. It could be a data structure, a library, or even a different language. You might not have time to refactor your working code, but you can carry these ideas forward.

Especially reduce the code you write by using existing code. Yes - it can be fun to write your own weird data structures and hack up ways to parse text. And, sure, you can do it. But code is great not just because it works - it needs to be debugged for every edge case, it needs to fail gracefully and informatively when things don’t make sense. A battle-tested library will already have gone through this. Your code is new; new code is dangerous. Write as little as possible.

Be a ruthless critic. Scan your code, and look for ugly parts that are hard to understand. Was there a clearer way? Especially practice the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle : are there sections of code that are nearly identical? Or just similar patterns that recur? Get pissed off at your code, so that you’re always reaching to improve it.

Ignore ‘Top-Coder’ type challenges. (Sorry, guys.) Competitive programming is like speed-chess; it will ruin your real chess game. Don’t spend your time solving hard problems; real software isn’t hard - rather it’s big and lives in a chaotic world. It has to be robust, easy to work with, easy to adapt and expand. Doing this is a different skill set.

Make it fixable. If you pop open the hood of your car, you’ll see the battery is always on top, easy to find and remove. The fuel pump is God-knows where. That’s because the battery is the single most likely element to fail and need replacing. The car is designed with the mechanic in mind.

As you’re building your code, debugging goes quicker if you have methods to log every error, along with printing out relevant states, objects or data structures. Don’t put this off till the end, build in a “debug-trace” right away which you can toggle on or off, to get a dump of what happened.

Leave all that code in. When you’re beta-testing, turn it on. Now when others use your program and it blows up, you can get diagnostic information from them; rather than having to reproduce their error from scratch and hope that you can recreate it. Vets call this “Error Instrumentation”.

Turn over every stone. There’s weird parts of the language you’re working in, that you never learned because you never used them. The problem is, it’s the other way around - you never used them because you never learned. You’ve been coding around this gap in your knowledge. What the hell is a lambda ? A list comprehension? Const-ref ? Kick those rocks over and play with those things.

See the world. Travel to distant lands.

While you’re achieving mastery of one language, take time out to go play around in others. What’s functional programming like? Give Scheme a try - or go really old school and try Lisp. How about Smalltalk - which is so object oriented that 2+2 is done by sending the ‘2’ object a ‘+ 2’ message? What’s up with Go? All I know is it’s new …

Different languages expand your way of thinking. It’s one thing to work in a language with, say, static typing. It’s quite another to have made that choice deliberately and to be able to articulate the reason for it.

You may even find yourself hacking up some missing feature from another language.

You don’t have to get good at these languages, just so long as you gain some kind of feel for their differences.

Stay mediocre. That is, keep thinking of your work that way. It’s like writing prose or music. “Talent” is mostly due to having very good taste; most good writers finish their work in half-disgust because it forever falls short of their ideal.

But then something magic happens. Other people say, “Wow, that is really good.” You accept the compliment, but secretly don’t believe it.

Six months later, you come across that piece of work. Not as a writer, but as a reader. And you’re struck by a realization : “Wow, that’s good.”

And that is the best feeling in the world.

It’s not easy. I lied.

It’s a long way off.

It’s worth it.


May 11, 2018

When someone asks a question, how do I view the profile of that person?

Totally. All the time. Right there in my feed in front of God and everybody :

Each question says “— asked by “ after it.

Quora doesn’t do this naturally, it’s because I have a browser plugin installed called “The Qure.”

I wrote the thing. And gave it away free.

Cuz I’m cool like that.

http://ominax.com/qure


May 11, 2018

Why do so many white parents still oppose school integration efforts?

I grew up in a white, white town in Connecticut. My high school was huge despite it being in a rural area - it had almost 3,000 students bussed in from distant towns.

There were virtually no black kids. I think 6 or so.

I didn’t have a black friend, a black teacher, I never encountered a black person behind a register.

When I was in eighth grade, the science teacher quite casually told us that black people were less intelligent, and when shown a problem with a tilted bottle half-full of water - they would fail to realize the water would be level with the ground, not the bottom of the bottle. (This teacher also passed around a beaker full of mercury so the kids could wiggle their finger in it to “see what it was like.” I’m not making this up.)

No parent called, he didn’t get fired, it was a non event. For all I know he’d been saying that for years.

Black people lived in distant cities, and cities were full of crime (urban crime spiked around 1980.) Black people were scary.

Racist jokes were commonplace. Being dishonest, or lazy, or dumb would be described with a racist epithat.

It wasn’t based in any actual experience with black people; we were repeating what we heard from the less educated parents. Like smoking, it had an edge of rebellion to it so it felt cool.

When I was 14 I was in Boston helping my brother move. I made a racist joke that essentially there must be some disadvantaged minority who could do this for us.

I got a stunned and disgusted look from my brother’s friend. My brother had to apologize on my behalf.

That was the first (and only necessary) time that I learned You Don’t Do That.

My second job after college, I moved to Boston. I got a job at a place called BBN, famous at the time for early development of the internet (ARPANET). My first day, I was told I would be taken under the wing of Dave - a mathematics/computer science double-major (joint concentration) from Harvard.

I walked into an office and came face to face with Dave, a black guy from Harvard who was smarter than me, in his spare time sang with a famous choir, who turned me on to The Cure and helped me navigate the politics of a big company.

And that was the day I learned why You Don’t Do That.

Why do parents oppose school integration? Because they are like the parents I learned those jokes from.

Why do people like me support integration?

Because it was 26 years before I met Dave.

That’s too long.


May 12, 2018

How effective was allied strategic bombing in curbing the war effort of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?

It didn’t fulfill its early promise.

That part of the 20th century was the age of ‘miracles and wonders’, where technological innovation was at a pace never experienced before or since.

Just two generations had seen the advent of automobiles, telephones, radio, the machine gun - the airplane, and so on.

Germany and America shared a similar belief : One could invent a path to victory. From new tactics that orchestrated all available technology like Blitzkrieg to the smallest of handy gizmos like a radio headset with a microphone attached to the soldier’s throat so he could be heard during the roar of combat - Germany believed they could overwhelm larger armies.

They were right. Only the English channel, and 500 miles of Russian mud could stall the Blitz.

The Americans had their own vision of technological war : Bombers could be made ultra-precise so that “you could land a bomb in a pickle barrel” - an actual expression they used.

Given this ability, the idea was that every war economy has “choke points”, places that don’t seem important at first glance, but if destroyed would greatly harm their industrial output.

Weird things like ball-bearings. Everything that turns, rolls or spins needs them. Hell - you can’t really make ball-bearings without ball-bearings.

So the idea was that strategic bombing would identify these weak points and take them out. By the time we encountered the enemy on the ground, he would be out of ammunition, fuel, vehicles and food.

With this in mind, America built a new machine - the Norden Bombsight :

This contraption was considered so important that bombadiers swore an oath to defend it with their life against falling into enemy hands (how they do that, I have no idea.)

It had gyros to hold it steady even in turbulence; a mechanical computer to account for wind and even temperature. In test conditions, it worked freakishly well.

In battle, however, it faltered. It’s only useful during the day - when you can see the target - which made the bombers easy prey for artillery and fighters. It also takes practice to get good at; as losses mounted crews had less live experience.

And war industries proved not as fragile as strategists thought; the enemy was more wiley and adaptable at compensating for damaged ‘choke-points’.

Towards the end of the war, the US abandoned precision bombing and started carpet-bombing of civilian areas. Entire cities were largely incinerated by firebombs dropped by a thousand planes.

It is claimed the purpose was to demoralize the civilian population so they might overthrow the government. But that didn’t happen either; as in the bombing of London, it served only to steel people’s resolve.

I did come across one explanation, in reference to the bombing of Dresden (about 20,000 killed, absolutely no military significance or even air defenses, a few months before war’s end.) It was an unnamed general who didn’t speak on record, but reportedly told a distraught pilot :

“We wish to inflict carnage and slaughter upon innocents so traumatic that in every city, every town, parents tell their children and then their grandchildren of the horror and heartbreak of war. Your fathers fought Germany, and now you fight them. We seek to end not just this war with Germany, but all war with Germany.”

That is the only explanation of strategic bombing I’ve come across that makes any sense at all.


May 12, 2018

Isn't pleading the fifth as good as admitting wrongdoing?

The law makes excellent use of ambiguity sometimes.

Taking the fifth is exercising your option not to give testimony which you feel may tend to incriminate you.

So this hinges of the legal definition of incriminate,

from Black’s law dictionary :

“To charge with crime; to expose to an accusation or charge of crime;to involve oneself or another in a criminal prosecution or the danger thereof …”

So this is pretty slippery, it could be admitting you committed a crime, or it could be exposing you to being charged/prosecuted/convicted despite your innocence.

For example, a Bank is robbed at 3:30 and you had parked right in front of it. At 3:35, unaware of the robbery, you drove away.

A prosecutor asks your whereabouts at 3:30 on that day, and you plead the fifth because that information can expose you to criminal prosecution. You might do this in order to force the prosecutor to divulge exactly what proof he can show as to your exact whereabouts and activities that day.

He’s falsely accused you - you don’t wish to help him.

Now the burden is on him to place you at the scene of the crime. There’s a lot of ways this can go wrong for the prosecution and it forces them to tip their hand as to how they built their case.

It may turn out they only have a single witness who saw you there. And your lawyer determined they were drunk and on LSD at the time.

The Judge would dismiss the case and you’d go home.

But if you answered the question, the trial would continue.

Pleading the fifth doesn’t make a good impression on a jury, but it isn’t an admission of guilt and sometimes an innocent person is wise to invoke it.


May 13, 2018

What's Barron Trump's IQ?

Time-honored tradition in the US holds that minor children of the President aren’t discussed in any public forum.

(Reporters occasionally forget this, and are fired without exception or delay.
Hill staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigns after remarks about Obama daughters)

You won’t even see an image of the kid except when intentionally posing with the President or First Lady.


May 13, 2018

What are the disadvantages of a free market economy?

I’m pro free-market, but we have to give Marx a little credit.

Marx warned than in a free market, wealth concentrates into a dangerously small elite.

When this occurs, violent revolution can erupt (“let them eat cake!”). In any case, the society destabilizes. The wealthy are always at the mercy of the good will - or at least docility - of the working class.

Historically, societies that endure take care to redistribute enough wealth to counter this free-market dynamic.

The Economist aren’t exactly leftist radicals, but they make this point here : Labour is right—Karl Marx has a lot to teach today’s politicians

To be clear : socialism is disastrous. So is laissez-faire capitalism. What works is an uneasy hybrid of the two.


May 13, 2018

Without saying the number, how old are you?

I saw the live TV broadcast of Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but I don’t remember.


May 13, 2018

How can I disable the "Use Quora App" popup when trying to access Quora from my phone's browser? I don't really want to install the app, prefer the website.

Edit (May 17) :

Here’s a simple work around :In your mobile browser, enter the URL : quora.com/profile

Poof, you’re in, no block-up.

You can save that shortcut to your home-screen for one-click access.


May 14, 2018

Everyone I know says that high school is the best time of their lives, I don't think that high school has been too great for me. I'm a Junior, will it get better?

High school really isn’t the best - or even a good - part of many people’s lives.

For some kids it is - but often these are the kids who, as Billy Joel puts it, “peaked too early.” The football star, the gorgeous cheerleader, and these days - I suppose the edgy yet charming kid with 50,000 Youtube followers.

But for many (most?) people you’re awkward, broke, full of unrequited love and lust, adrift, confused, overconfident, underachieving and so on.

You begin to find direction, meaning, love and fulfillment in later years - continually growing with occasional disasters but a general upward trajectory.

There’s a video somewhere of Billy Joel explaining why he wrote this song about people who Peak Too Early, I’ll try to find it and paste a link here.

Meanwhile, here’s the song anyway (it’s a two-parter, skip to 1:44

Brenda and Eddie were the
Popular steadies
And the king and the queen
Of the prom
Riding around with the car top
Down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
They lived for a while in a
Very nice style
But it's always the same in the end
They got a divorce as a matter
Of course
And they parted the closest
Of friends
Then the king and the queen went
Back to the green
But you can never go back
There again
Brenda and Eddie had had it
Already by the summer of '75
From the high to the low to
The end of the show
For the rest of their lives

May 15, 2018

How do I call a function in main that is in another CPP file? I've made a header with my functions and created a source file in the same folder and gave instructions to the functions.

Assuming you’re working in Unix, you’re almost there!

So let’s call your “side” file side.cpp, and let’s say your function looks like this -

// file side.cpp

void do_this(int number)

{

// my cool side stuff

}

And it sounds like you have your header file,

// file : side.h

// These weird # statements are a traditional way of

// gracefully handling being included multiple times

#ifndef SIDE_LIBRARY

#define SIDE_LIBRARY

void do_this(int number);

#endif

And finally you have a main file like this :

// file main.cpp

#include "side.h"

int main()

{

do_this(5);

}

Make sure side.h, side.cpp and main.cpp are all in the same directory.

Compile side.cpp to Object Code,

g++ -g -c side.cpp

You’ll notice a side.o file got created.

Now compile main.cpp and link in the object code,

g++ -o doit main.cpp side.o

So main.cpp needs to get two hands around side.cpp - the header file to alert it that the function is declared somewhere else, and the object file to provide the function at link-time.


May 15, 2018

How would you explain your job to a 5-year-old?

I make incredibly complex computer things that don’t work.


May 15, 2018

Is there anyone who isn’t a 2018 Top Writer?

Alright, time to sound off. Which I can do because the question is rhetorical anyway.

I’ve gotten the quill 3 or 4 times (I forget and refuse to check.) Most top writers prior to 2017 have multiple quills.

This year they decided to expand the class to include newer writers. And that is a sorely needed thing.

Because Quora is growing, and that means great new writers are joining the site.

I’ve heard a lot of repeat TW’s react to this by making snide remarks about new TW’s. That is really crappy behavior - remember the first quill you ever got? Admit it, you were elated. How would you have felt if all these old-timers kept bleating that it’s worthless and you suck anyway?

When Quora gave you a quill, I am sure they expected you’d assume the distinction with a certain grace.

Or at least enough basic courtesy to welcome the new classes.

Guys : Don’t be a sore winner.


May 15, 2018

How can you change the data type from a list into an integer considering the fact that the list only contains one element in Python?

x[0]


May 15, 2018

Why do you write on Quora? What's the benefit? What do you gain from sharing your knowledge on this platform? What does Quora give to the contributors aka the writers?

An audience.

If you write on a blog site, you’re lucky to get 50 views.

On Quora you can get millions.

The fact that the posts are answers to questions means there is already at least once person who wants to read it right away.


May 15, 2018

How come Quora headings (questions) for me are no longer in bold? The bold disappears after a few seconds.

You’re probably on Chrome and using my plugin, ominax.com/qure.

I should have a fix ready by tomorrow morning.

Edit : It’s fixed now, you can reinstall it here : Qure


May 15, 2018

What do you think about Bill Gates stating he would short bitcoin if he could, because it's not a productive asset class but “a pure 'greater fool theory' type of investment"?

Obviously he could. But he won’t.

When a guy with $90B won’t put a single dollar behind his statement, whether we should believe him is the wrong question.

He doesn’t believe himself.


May 15, 2018

What type of fancy cheese do rich white people enjoy the most, if you had to guess?

The nouveaux riche eat Brie, because they saw it on an episode of Friends 20 years ago.

Old money eats Roquefort, because it’s the best damn cheese ever made. Unlike the rest of us though, they call up some friends from the Skull and Bones, arrange for the euro to crash against the dollar so they can save $1.25 .


May 16, 2018

Do you feel proud if you know how to reverse a linked list?

I don’t mean to offend, but it’s a rather tedious and pointless exercise.

I know how to do it. The short and simple way. But you won’t ever catch me doing it or thinking about it.

If someone got confused trying, though - I wouldn’t conclude anything from that except they might not have patience for tedious and pointless exercises.

Many pedagogues insist that you have to know this sort of thing. They are like the math teachers who insisted I learn how to use a trig table so I understand … the hard way.

You no more need to know this than you need to learn to smelt your own steel to make a wrench to remove a bolt.

I reverse a linked list by calling a .reverse() method on it.

Full stop.


May 16, 2018

Why do mathematicians assume classical logic is the appropriate way to reason with non-physical mathematical objects?

Logic is not optional.


May 17, 2018

Who came up with the idea of vaping?

A Chinese pharmacist named Hon Lik invented the first e-cigarette.


May 17, 2018

Why does Quora force me to use their app on my smartphone instead of allowing me to use a full desktop version?

It appears Quora is trying to drive mobile traffic to their app.

Here’s a simple work around :

In your mobile browser, enter the URL : quora.com/profile

Poof, you’re in, no block-up.

You can save that shortcut to your homescreen for one-click access.


May 17, 2018

Why do supercomputers use Linux and not an OS specially made for HPC?

Supercomputing doesn’t have much to do with the OS.

The OS worries about tying all the hardware together, displays, file systems, net connection, and so on.

Supercomputing doesn’t concern itself with that, it deals with data in super-fast memory connected to parallel processors of various flavors (Flynn's taxonomy - Wikipedia ). It takes pains to avoid even writing to the disk; or for that matter to the host machine’s RAM.

The host machine really just pushes the code and initial data to the streaming processors and then gets out of its way.

For supercomputing, the OS is ideally as small and resource-modest as possible.


May 17, 2018

What can I say instead of 'no offense,' so that the person actually doesn't take any offence?

Nothing.

Whenever you find yourself about to say, “No offense but” and especially “I probably shouldn’t say this but” - remain silent.

Trust me on this one.


May 18, 2018

How can some very smart software developers able to build web backend, frontend and native mobile applications?

Smart is different than skillful.

Smart knows how to do; skillful knows how to minimize doing. Skillful is aggressively lazy.

Backend : Use Firebase instead and let Google do it for you, for free. Done.

Front End :

Find a nice open source-design to give the general aesthetic of your site : Open Source Web Design . They are all mobile-friendly, gracefully downsizing themselves to a mobile screen.

Now add JavaScript to make the site dynamic using a client-side templating library Minimal Templating on Steroids, moving data from Firebase to web page and back again.

Refuse to make a mobile app. #2 already works great on mobile. Instead, give the user a button to add a shortcut to their homescreen. It will look just like an app.

You’re like a week away from a MVP. OK, 4 weeks. Still, though.

You avoided creating a database, and all server-side code. The only code you have to push is HTML and Javascript.

Hell, you could even just push it to Home | DropPages.com right out of dropbox instead of registering a domain name quite yet.

Three cheers for the dumb way to do things.


May 18, 2018

Why do nearly all supercomputers run Linux? GNU/Linux is just one of many operating systems.

Supercomputing doesn’t have much to do with the OS.

The OS worries about tying all the hardware together, displays, file systems, net connection, and so on.

Supercomputing doesn’t concern itself with that, it deals with data in super-fast memory connected to parallel processors of various flavors (Flynn's taxonomy - Wikipedia ). It takes pains to avoid even writing to the disk; or for that matter to the host machine’s RAM.

The host machine really just pushes the code and initial data to the streaming processors and then gets out of its way.

For supercomputing, the OS is ideally as small and resource-modest as possible.


May 18, 2018

If you met Donald Trump for the first time what would you say to him?

Рад познакомиться с вами, г-н Председатель.


May 18, 2018

How do I extend the class tuple in Python 3?

Here’s an example of exactly that - Objects and classes in Python tutorial

from collections import namedtuple

class Point(tuple):

def __new__(self, x, y):

return tuple.__new__(Point, (x, y))


May 18, 2018

Why does the <div> tag move down if I add something inside it, when it has enough space to align to the side, if I don't insert something inside it, then it aligns to the right perfectly, why does it act like that?

<divs> are designed to take up a new line by default (i.e., are a block element HTML Block and Inline Elements.) It’s deceptive when div’s are empty - the browser may take a shortcut and not render it at all (provided you don’t set a minimum height/width). This can create cascading weirdness as the rest of layout reacts to this optimization. A good trick is to always stub an empty div as <div>&nbsp;</div> when you’re experimenting.

What you want to do, I think, is either use a <span> or over-ride the div’s default positioning to float.

See this example for how to use float for the type of thing in your fiddle,

http://ttps://www.w3schools.com/cssref/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_float6


May 19, 2018

How damaging exactly is smoking "one" cigarette daily?

Yea, the cancer-risk of smoking is fairly linear with the amount smoked.

So 1 cigarette per day is roughly 5% as cancer-causing as a pack-a-day smoker.

This goes up of course, if you linger over this cigarette, inhaling more deeply and pausing before exhaling.

Then of course there’s the addictive dynamic that one per day turns into two and then three pretty quickly.


May 19, 2018

In 2018 why are so many people fixated on programming/coding language/careers/minutiae when software engineering and automated code generation have been around for ages and will displace 80% of coding Real Soon Now?

I take it you don’t realize “Real Soon Now” (capitalized) is a euphemism for “never”. It came from the software development community of the 80’s.

So - yea, we coders know that AI will put us out of work Real Soon Now.

For at least another 40 years.

And here’s a spoiler :

We’re the ones building it. It’s slow going but we’re kind of having a blast.


May 19, 2018

Is there any app, setting, etc. which I can use to hide/show Quora answers/questions according to custom rules?

I have a plugin which highlights/hides questions depending on whether or not they are anonymous or links to external sites.

If you can code, you can modify the source to suit your needs,

iridiumblue/qure


May 20, 2018

In Python, how do I make one function wait for like 5 seconds but have all of the other code to still run?

A simple and elegant solution is given here, from the blog of Fred Wenzel :

setTimeout in Python

# utils.py

import threading

from functools import wraps

def delay(delay=0.):

"""

Decorator delaying the execution of a function for a while.

"""

def wrap(f):

@wraps(f)

def delayed(*args, **kwargs):

timer = threading.Timer(delay, f, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)

timer.start()

return delayed

return wrap

This creates a decorator, and hides it away in a file you never have to look at again. Now you can forget about threads and just do this :

#main.py

from utils import delay

@delay(3.0)

def my_func(arg1, arg2):

print arg1, arg2

if __name__ == '__main__':

my_func('Hello', 'world')


May 20, 2018

Is it just me or does Ubuntu 16.04 really really suck?

It’s a little bumpy, yea.

But I found the Mint 18.3 Mate distro firmly bolted together, without wasting resources with a lot of screen pyrotechnics.


May 20, 2018

What are some ways the U.S. government can stop the 38 million Americans currently smoking?

I think we should channel the “sin-tax” money towards subsidizing e-cigarettes.

After multiple failed attempts in the past, vaping enabled me to quit smoking almost effortlessly. While I am still ingesting nicotine, the harm reduction is drastic.

The US takes a generally dim and suspicious view of vaping, claiming all sorts of uncertainties. The thing is - tobacco is quite certain to be extremely harmful. The only way from there is up.

My doctor is happy, anyway. As are the doctors at the UK’s National Health Service :

Long-term vaping 'far safer than smoking' says 'landmark' study


May 21, 2018

Has an EMP weapon ever been deployed in a theater of war?

In 2015, the US Air Force Research Laboratory made public the development of EM pulse weapons in conjunction with the usual big defense contractors.

U.S. Air Force confirms Boeing’s electromagnetic pulse weapon

The Department of Defense is very calculated in what they divulge and when. A general rule of thumb is by the time they make something public, it has been kept secret for quite some time.

They would deny this, but it’s rather an open secret that these weapons were used since the first Iraq War. I suspect the main reason they have lifted the veil of secrecy is to attract more funding, encourage competition among contractors, and because they anticipate scaling up production so that “existential secrecy” isn’t feasible.

They now seem to focused on, er - focusing the thing. An EMP similar to a high altitude nuclear air-burst is good to knock out a whole power grid and all communications, but now they are now devising ways to target specific facilities. The technology involves not a single pulse but a directed microwave signal, which greatly reduces the total energy required. High-power microwave (HPM) / E-Bomb


May 22, 2018

What are the things you stop doing after you reach 40?

Putting off preventative health care.

You drink too much, maybe you smoke, you don’t get regular exercise, you don’t manage stress, you haven’t been to the doctor for a checkup in, like, forever.

And you’ve gotten away with it because you’re young.

Time’s up on that.


May 23, 2018

In all legitimacy, I can't get addicted to things. I've smoked for years, and quit instantly, same with alcohol. What is the science behind this?

There is a great deal of evidence that genetics plays a critical role in addiction,

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh312/111-118.pdf

I shouldn’t overstate my case; scientists haven’t identified any particular set of genes which predispose people to addiction, nor determined the degree of causation.

That said, the data suggest it’s a reasonable hypothesis that you’re just not genetically wired for addiction.


May 23, 2018

In computer programming, what are the languages that engineers use to create other languages like Java, jQuery, etc.?

Most programming languages are written in C.

For that matter, latter versions of C are written in earlier versions of C.

To test that, say, C 4.3 worked correctly, they compiled it with 4.2. Finally, they would compile 4.3 using itself.

The resultant binaries should be identical (except for any intentional differences.) Then they recompile 4.3 with itself yet again, and now the binaries should match in every case.

Ahem. I digress.

It’s not turtles all the way down, though. The original C was written in Assembly - essentially machine code.


May 23, 2018

Why doesn't this jQuery function return true or false?

Here’s your code :

function loggedin() {

$.post("./core/forms/checkLoggedin", {}, function(data) {

if (data === "true") {

return true;

}else{

return false

}

})

}

The problem is that $.post() is asynchronous. It sends a request over the web, attaches a callback function and then calls it a day, returning nothing.

When the server responds to your request - some seconds later, the function(data) stuff gets called. But the outer loggedIn() function is long-gone by that time.

So you need to restructure your code a bit, one simple way is add a function which handles the response of the post :

function loggedin() {

$.post("./core/forms/checkLoggedin", {}, function(data) {

my_handler(data);

})

}

And in my_handler goes basically everything you do next, including checking for “true”.

If that feels a little clunky, I hear you. You may want to look into promises jQuery API Documentation, which handle such things more elegantly.

(Higher level, more conceptual introduction here - JQuery Promises and Deferreds: I promise this will be short)


May 24, 2018

Is it normal for a programmer to be angry at people for writing bad code? A few of my classmates paid me to fix some of their bugs and when I read the code I got so mad because they had so many syntax errors, so many bugs, so many bad practices.

Yea, it’s a common visceral response to get angry at really bad code.

I think it’s because of the enormous effort you have to expend in order to understand it. Effort demanded of you because the writer was lazy or dumb.

Like someone talking to you with their mouth stuffed full of marshmallows. You strain to hear, can’t understand why they don’t spit those things out and who in their right mind has to eat so many damn marshmallows in the first place.


May 24, 2018

Am I the only one who supports a genocidal crusade against conservative regressives, say, 150-200 M dead? It'll no longer divide us when there's no one against us and we can retake our place on the world stage of respect.

Just the other day I was listening to a song I hadn’t heard in a while, by the late, immortally great David Bowie.

It was a sci-fi song, about a dystopian future. It’s a warning about the Authoritarian Left, who are just as dangerous as the Authoritarian Right. How life is as bleak, as abysmal, and as tenuous under Stalin as it is under Hitler.

It’s a warning about thinking the way you are when you posed this question. About how “love thy neighbor” so easily becomes “love thy neighbor or else I’ll fucking kill you.”

And God, it’s beautiful.

The silent guns of love
Will blast the sky
We broke the ruptured structure built of age
Our weapons were the tongues of crying rage
Where money stood
We planted seeds of rebirth
And stabbed the backs of fathers
Sons of dirt
Infiltrated business cesspools
Hating through our sleeves
Yea, and we slit the Catholic throat
Stoned the poor
On slogans such as
'Wish You Could Hear'
'Love Is All We Need'
'Kick Out The Jams'
'Kick Out Your Mother'
'Cut Up Your Friend'
'Screw Up Your Brother or He'll Get You In the End'
And we know the flag of love is from above
And we can force you to be free
And we can force you to believe
And I close my eyes and tighten up my brain
For I once read a book in which the lovers were slain
For they knew not the words of the Free States' refrain
It said:
"I believe in the power of good
I believe in the state of love
I will fight for the right to be right
I will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right"
And I open my eyes to look around
And I see a child laid slain
On the ground
As a love machine lumbers through desolation rows
Plowing down man, woman, listening to its command
But not hearing anymore
Not hearing anymore
Just the shrieks from the old rich .

May 25, 2018

How do you solve for n in a^n=na?

Exponents are often a cue to take the log of both sides.

log(a^n) = log(na)

n log(a) = log(n) + log(a)

I’ll leave the rest to you. Watch out for logs of negative numbers.


May 25, 2018

How do you deal with the Senior developer in your team who refuses to follow the PEP 8 coding standards and naming conventions?

It’s really not worth “dying on that hill.”

There have always been coders who just won’t behave in that regard, and naming conventions can sometimes get insane and duty calls one to rebellion (Hungarian notation - Wikipedia).


May 25, 2018

Can or will Mr. George Takei be redeemed?

He has been, the accuser has withdrawn his allegations after he kept changing his story and eventually failed to make any sense whatever.

And George acknowledged the news with the unique grace of a man steeled by bitter adversity, who endured an internment camp in his youth, who could not marry the one he loved until just 10 years ago.

As many of you know, this has been a very difficult period for myself and my husband Brad as we have dealt with the impact of these accusations, but we are happy to see that this nightmare is finally drawing to a close. As I stated before, I do not remember Mr. Brunton or any of the events he described from forty years ago, but I do understand that this was part of a very important national conversation that we as a society must have, painful as it might be. It is in that spirit that I want folks to know, despite what he has put us through, I do not bear Mr. Brunton any ill will, and I wish him peace. Brad and I are especially grateful for the many fans who stood by me throughout this ordeal. Your support kept us going, and we are so immensely thankful for you.
--Uncle George

George, you are one hell of a class act, and a sterling example of Churchill’s words,

“Let them do their worst. We shall do our best.”


May 25, 2018

Does Malcolm Gladwell's explanation for mass shootings take the research into consideration?

Malcolm Gladwell may be safely relied upon not to burden himself with scientific data. In his own words,

Not sure if it makes me stand out. What I try to do—try to be—is unafraid of making a fool of myself. Often I will often say something that later I consider wrong. I don’t mind changing my mind. The older I get, the more I’ve come to understand that the only way of pursuing valuable things and saying valuable things is if you lose your fear of standing corrected. Especially as a writer. I’m not making fiscal policy for the United States where an error is catastrophic. I’m provoking people to think. An appropriate mindset to have if that is your job, is to be unafraid. It’s about trying an argument out in front of intelligent people. There’s a 40% chance I’ll be wrong, but that’s OK. That’s the mindset you need to have. — Malcolm Gladwell, http://ttps://qz.com/283945/malcolm-gladwell-on-the-key-to-success-dont-be-afraid-to-look-like-a-fool/

His motivation is to be provocative (which he is very good at), but the first provocation should be to fact-check him.

Most of us are not at all comfortable with a 60% confidence interval.


May 25, 2018

What are the most common mistakes novice programmers make?

Choosing the wrong language to learn first. This single mistake can slow you down by a factor of 10.

Ironically, some of the most useful languages today are awful first languages to learn. That’s because useful languages evolve a lot, often out of desperate necessity. It has to mutate away from its original design, and the result is a conceptual mess.

JavaScript is a perfect example, it started as a way to add some dynamism to web pages, then just exploded into client-side processing like handlebars.js, server side stuff like node.js, the JQuery layer that handles DOM trees (and 10,000 different things.)

The result is very powerful, but a complete and total fucking mess. The JavaScript Minefield

It was much the same story with C++ in the nineties. C started out as a low level language, just enough above assembler to keep the programmer from going crazy, but close enough to memory registers that you could still feel the metal.

Then came objects and GUI frameworks and all hell broke loose; they had to introduce classes and then templates and all sorts of crap. What emerged was a highly effective, but massively tangled mosh-pit.

If you start off with one of these languages, you learn more slowly. Like learning to ride a bike in a dense fog.

Start with a language that isn’t so useful that it was forced to mutate. I have a weird predisposition to Lisp/Scheme, but that’s probably because I’ve been brainwashed by MITers. Even so, it’s a good place to start. It’s the heart of “functional” programming.

Smalltalk is another good place to start. It’s sort of the perfect “object oriented” language.

As a beginner, of course, you don’t really know the difference between “object oriented” and “functional.” Not to worry, they both work; they are different perspectives for doing the same thing.

Most useful languages are a hybrid of object-oriented and functional. Python is like that. You’ll lose the fine distinction between the O.O. and functional, but Python is still very clean, unmutated, and I think it’s a great place to start so long as you pinky-swear to check out Scheme and Smalltalk some day.

Oh - you say you started with C++ in college? Don’t entrust your education to a university.

That’s the second biggest mistake novice programmers make.


May 25, 2018

Do most white Americans consider themselves the only true Americans, and don't consider other races like Asian Americans to be American?

My family immigrated into New York, as so many others did. They settled there for a while.

Each new wave set off a brief period of panic. The Irish were lazy drunks! Turned out they made great cops and politicians. The Italians though! And now the Greeks! Asians!

They came anyway and became such an engrained part of our culture that we really can’t imagine modern American life without them.

In the immigrant ghettos of New York, a joke emerged. For the 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants afraid of the next wave :

“Pull the ladder up after me.”


May 25, 2018

What institutes provide advice to startup enthusiasts?

Y Combinator does nothing but recruit, advise, and provide seed-capital to newbie startups.


May 25, 2018

What remakes of films are better than the original?

The new Lost in Space is pretty good IMO :

You have to overlook a few painful plot holes (What are the chances of landing on a planet thriving with life evolved over eons, just 2 weeks before it crashes into a black hole!?)

It’s not great but its young actors are really good and I can’t stop watching it.

The original series is literally the single thing people point to most frequently to exemplify the word ‘campy’ :

A cardboard and tinfoil Gilligan’s Island.

Way to take it up a notch, Netflix.


May 26, 2018

Why do wallpaper websites download the image when I want to open the image link in a new tab? If I right click on the 'download original' link to open in new tab, it downloads regardless. Why is that?

It sounds like you’re using Firefox and need to tweak Change what Firefox does when you click on or download a file these settings to handle a jpg file with a viewer.

The problem stems from the fact the .jpg file isn’t wrapped in HTML, so the browser is confused about what to do with it.


May 26, 2018

You have 20 seconds. How many lines of output can you create in that time with a 'normal' programming language?

Infinitely many and I have 17 seconds to spare.


May 26, 2018

Which vape pen best simulates the actual act of smoking?

A salt-based device like the JUUL most closely simulates the rapid nicotine “hit” of smoking.

You can save a ton of money though if you get this device instead. Sturdier, cheaper, more flavor options :

The Aspire Breeze goes for 25 bucks or so,

You can load up on salt-based flavors here, Mr.Salt-E Eliquid

Note : Make sure the coils have resistance 1 Ohm or higher, this is required for use with salt-based nicotine.


May 26, 2018

Other than pair programming, how can an agile team be motivated to deliver a feature in a short, pressure induced amount of time?

Be careful what you wish for.

The Agile philosophy is to let the developers tell you how long it will take to do stuff, not to the other way around. Because the worst that can happen is you win that argument.

Rushing development imparts technical debt that doesn’t show up in a burn-down chart, slowing down progress - er, “feature velocity” until the whole structure can collapse.

Think it can’t happen to you?

It happened more than once to Microsoft (ME/Vista.) It happened more than once to Apple.

The lesson that emerged is that developers are in the best position to know how hard something is going to be.

So ask them. The urge to do the opposite - tell them - is quite tempting and understandable. It’s what’s led otherwise very smart and successful companies into development tar-pits from which they were lucky to emerge at all.

“Ask, don’t tell” - is the mantra of healthy, safe, and reliable scheduling.


May 26, 2018

Are there any Chrome plugins to filter out anonymous troll questions on Quora?

I made this, which either highlights or blocks questions posed anonymously.

Qure

I don’t possess the AI to detect a troll per se, but you get the idea.


May 26, 2018

Would I be wrong to consider mathematics as "out of context Physics"?

Well, I think you would, because math doesn’t need physical context.

Rather, physics is applied mathematics.

The mathematical constructs which form the foundation of physics, from the complex plane to the Calabi-Yau manifold, start off as purely abstract creatures, created and of interest for purely abstract reasons.

They end up critical to describing the physical world with astonishing regularity.


May 27, 2018

How can I tell if my programming is improving?

There are utilities you’ve written - libraries or whatever. And they’re covered in dust.

Not out of disuse; you use them daily. The dust is because you haven’t opened that file in a year. It Just Works in every case and there’s been no need to look under the hood.


May 27, 2018

If presented with a guaranteed O(NLogN) (constant case ie: worst, average and best), correctness verified, in-place, non-stable sorting algorithm that ALWAYS beats MergeSort, would you use it?

No, Merge sort is fast enough for the few times I am forced to sort.

Also, the ‘stable’ nature of it (that preserves order among ‘equal’ elements) is often useful for those cases where there is lots of equality (sorting posts by date, for example.)

Finally, I haven’t been aware of the exact algorithm I’m sorting with in about a decade, I just call a sort method on a container and count on it to do the right thing.


May 28, 2018

What is the logic behind some liberals silencing free speech if it remotely resembles white supremacism? If someone's views are fallacious and cause people harm, why not logically prove the error of their ways to them?

I agree with you, but your question is rhetorical (asked and answered because you really want to make a statement.)

Suggest you remove “If someone's views are fallacious and cause people harm, why not logically prove the error of their ways to them?” from the question and put it an answer. (It’s OK to ask and then answer your own Q)


May 28, 2018

Why does a programmer take so much time to code when he only does an “insert and delete” kind of work?

Why have you been waiting on them all these years?

Too busy to learn coding and save all that time?


May 28, 2018

What do you think of "Elizabeth Holmes had hundreds of millions of dollars invested into a product she knew didn’t work"?

Damn the Aussies have a slow news cycle.


May 29, 2018

Which movie, were it erased from existence, would majorly change history as we know it?

The Manchurian Candidate.

Shit, wrong timeline …


May 30, 2018

Why did Japan not destroy all the ports in Hawaii during the Pearl Harbor attack to weaken the US military logistical support?

To add a bit to Jonathan Lawler ‘s answer about limited aircraft and munition, although destruction of the port facilities was out of reach, the Japanese had planned for a third sortie to destroy the considerable fuel reserves stored nearby :

5 million gallons of fuel oil

There’s a good chance that just one well-placed bomb would have ignited the entire oil field. That would have left the island without fuel, and probably have set fire to the adjacent forest, damaging Pearl Harbor’s supporting infrastructure within the island.

The Japanese knew all that, but didn’t want to push their luck. They’d lost only 29 planes thus far. Among others, 8 battle ships were heavily damaged - 4 of which sunk. This was at a time when airplanes weren’t considered a serious threat to battleships. Peal Harbor was thought to be out of range of Japan’s navy; the water too shallow for torpedoes.

The Japanese had already pulled off several tactical miracles. There was also the unsettling matter that the aircraft carriers were nowhere to be found (why didn’t they have a spy eyeballing the area?) . Had they been lured into starting a war, only to have their fleet sunk by carrier groups even now surrounding them?

It’s rather understandable that the Japanese decided to call it a day. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear they should have peeled off 5 or so dive bombers to hit the oil field, but war isn’t fought in retrospect - it’s waged in the chaos of real-time.


May 30, 2018

Why has the expression "folks" in place of "people" become increasingly popular?

I noticed Obama used the word a lot. Back me up here, Buzzfeed :

Confirmed: Obama Says The Word "Folks" A Lot

In the USA, it is a way of referring to people in a way which is somewhat warmer, unpretentious, and even familial.


May 31, 2018

Why is it so damn difficult for a conservative perspective to be respected on Quora? I believed Quora was populated with curious, open-minded, “intelligent” individuals, not closed-minded bigots.

Check it out :

Against the dialectic of ‘White Privilege’ :

Christopher Reiss's answer to I am a white person who does not believe in white privilege, am I racist?

Christopher Reiss's answer to Why do some white people have trouble understanding white privilege?

Christopher Reiss's answer to Does white privilege exist? If so, what is it?

Hundreds of upvotes, not a peep from Moderation.

For Intelligent design :

Christopher Reiss's answer to Do scientists ever look at evolution from a creationist viewpoint? If not, why not? Shouldn't evidence be looked at from all sides?

Christopher Reiss's answer to Does teaching intelligent design in schools really damage science?

Only a dozen upvotes each on these. Hey, while I have the right to be heard I don’t have the right to be popular.

Against (man-made) Global warming :

Christopher Reiss's answer to What are the most convincing reasons for me not to accept that there is global warming?. 280 upvotes.

Free Speech Absolutism (or, Defense of Hate Speech):

Christopher Reiss's answer to Why do some people believe that hate speech is NOT a crime, when there is evidence that hate is viral, and leads to violence and murder? Why shouldn't it be legislated as it is in Canada, where their free speech is not in any way lesser? 1,070 upvotes.

Christopher Reiss's answer to Is Boston Mayor Thomas Menino right to vow to block Chik-Fil-A from opening in Boston, due to their public opposition to same-sex marriage rights? 170 upvotes.

General railing against Identity Politics :

Christopher Reiss's answer to Who do you think is worse, the particularly toxic SJWs of today, or the fundamentalist moral guardians of yesteryear?

Christopher Reiss's answer to Why are there so many people now openly hostile toward “Social Justice Warriors”?

Now I am not a conservative by any stretch, but certainly some of my views fall into that camp on these hot-button issues. And these are just a few answers of mine like that; I could dig them up all day.

You ask why is it so damn difficult for a conservative perspective to be respected on Quora. I think the above record shows that they are, and that Quorans are sometimes even willing to give conservative posts applause.

That’s more than I could reasonable ask for. The only respect that I - or you or anyone else - can reasonably ask is the simple chance to speak. In the offline world, that would mean a chance to stand and say my piece without being shouted over, thrown out, or banned from entry in the first place.

Whether people cheer, boo or ignore me isn’t part of that bargain.

Back to Quora: when I wrote those posts, I was allowed to speak. No moderator came along and pulled me aside. No cabal of down-voters conspired to collapse them.

Sometimes I’d get cheered with upvotes, otherwise booed in comments, often both.

Here’s the thing: Getting booed doesn’t bother me. At all. I normally give dissenting commenters the last word, and upvote them as well.

What I don’t do is get into extended, heated debates in an attempt to quash their booing.

Because the respect thing goes two ways. If I’m going to ask the right to stand and voice dissent, then I’ve got to fervently uphold the right of the next guy to call me a jackass.

I would not corner that guy, and attempt to persuade him right then and there to convert to my way of thinking. Not only is that utterly futile, it’s takes up a lot of time I could otherwise use to speak to a broader audience.

Arguments are optional. When you spend all morning arguing with some damned idiot online, the other guy just did the same thing.


May 31, 2018

If you woke up in 2200, what would be your first Google search be?

Bitcoin price.


May 31, 2018

Why does my program in Python 3 print out random characters?

You appear to be using some Python libraries (I’m not familiar) that output color text to the terminal. That is usually tricky business, involving sending weird characters to the terminal, and hoping the the terminal knows the right thing to do with them.

If you remove the libraries and termcolor, and all the calls to color() and clear(), do whatever else that I’m forgetting, your code runs fine :

Enter the number you wanna go to:

>>>1000

(176, 'green') -> 86 -> 100 -> 1

(139, 'green') -> 91 -> 82 -> 68 -> 100 -> 1

(31, 'green') -> 10 -> 1

(392, 'green') -> 94 -> 97 -> 130 -> 10 -> 1

(793, 'green') -> 139 -> 91 -> 82 -> 68 -> 100 -> 1

(23, 'green') -> 13 -> 10 -> 1

(376, 'green') -> 94 -> 97 -> 130 -> 10 -> 1

(973, 'green') -> 139 -> 91 -> 82 -> 68 -> 100 -> 1

(1, 'green')

(637, 'green') -> 94 -> 97 -> 130 -> 10 -> 1

In general, the lesson that emerges is get the algorithm right before worrying about pyrotechnics like color text.


Jun 1, 2018

How do I create a program for circle generation in C, without using the circle generation function and without taking radius as input from a user using putpixel?

I don’t know where you get your radius, but if you want to render a nice smooth circle, use the parameterized form,

X(theta) = radius * cos(theta)

Y(theta) = radius * sin(theta)

let theta sweep from 0 to 2 * pi in increments of, say, 2*pi/600. Plot X and Y for each theta. X and Y will be in the range [-1,1] so linearly scale them to fit your window.


Jun 1, 2018

What do computer programmers, software engineers and developers just "get" that other people don't?

It’s a con job. The whole thing.

When you write “Hello world”, the computer isn’t saying hello. It is pulling up a series of bitmaps that form those letters and throwing them on the screen.

That blinking vertical cursor that holds your place as you type, that’s some code in a loop going “line on … line off … until key is pressed.”

Your computer has no idea your mouse is an object on a table. When you move it, light bounces off your table and sends signals to a processor which applies equations and then moves the little arrow on your screen to create this illusion that your mouse and the arrow are connected.

There’s layers and layers of this, immense scaffolds of deception. Billions of 1’s and 0’s are flashing around desperately trying to uphold the mirage that the machine has the awareness and intuition of a 5-year old child.


Jun 2, 2018

How does "RecursionError" occur in the programming language Python? What is a very basic example of this?


Jun 2, 2018

What do you think of "Sandberg and Zuckerberg's differing responses to criticism epitomizes sexism at work"?

Here’s a wild thought: Ms. Sandberg is a unique human being who deserves the simple respect of being treated as such, rather than being invoked as a token political prop to advance whatever point *you* want to make about gender.


Jun 2, 2018

Is it true that most software developers think non-technical managers are stupid and don't want to be led by non-technical people?

Software is the only field I am aware of where Managers of X, who are not proficient in X, are even considered a possibility.

Imagine an editor who is not themselves a skillful writer? A chief of police who never made a bust? A Chief Surgeon who never took out an appendix?

Non technical managers aren’t stupid. But they waste dev’s time, as the developer has to continually explain things to them, and there is zero chance whatever the manager can contribute to the discussion in any way.

They’re in the way.

The most productive organizations promote developers to management positions. They are freed from coding themselves, and serve as a liason between non technical management and developers. They spend most of their time explaining stuff to management, extracting business goals from them, and helping out where they can when their devs get stuck.

The sooner you hit non-technical people up the chain of command, the more friction you incur. Many companies are just technical all the way to the CEO (Facebook, early Google, Quora etc.) so they can pass on this friction altogether.


Jun 2, 2018

How did the venture capitalists that invested in Theranos fall for Elizabeth Holmes' scam?

I think there were 2 essential dynamics she leveraged.

If people are cliff-diving into the water, they don’t do the most analytical thing - measure the water depth, height of the jump, survey the bottom for rocks sticking up.

They just watch to see if others are jumping off. Strangers are somewhat compelling, but if your friends are doing it - you leap.

So Holmes got her hooks into some very famous people like Kissinger. We don’t know how much equity they got in return for lending their credibility (Elizabeth Holmes), but I very much doubt they bought their way in under similar terms as VC’s.

The second dynamic is people aren’t looking for valuable opportunities, they are looking for undervalued opportunities. Sleeping beauties. Normally, sure - they’d love to go send in some biotech people to spend a week in Theranos’ lab for some due diligence.

But Theranos would insist, “This technology is so hot, so transformational we’ve got to keep it under wraps. The Chinese would steal this in a heartbeat. “ Which does make sense.

“And that’s keeping some more traditional investors away. It’s undervalued right now. Sure, we’re going to publish all our technology soon, but investing at that stage is a no brainer - we won’t need you then.”

“If you don’t want a piece, that’s cool with us, Kissinger set up a meeting with the UK’S NHS tomorrow afternoon and we’d like to bolt for the airport to be totally honest with ya …”

So lack of verification becomes a (rather perverse) selling point.

But sometimes the sleeping beauty is actually dead. I think the VC’s understood that.

(I shouldn’t overstate my case; I don’t think VCs suspected such bald-faced lies as faked demos. Here Holmes had descended into behavior that most people simply would not do; and here she benefited - fleetingly - from that audacity.)


Jun 3, 2018

What programming languages are most commonly used to make firmware for vape box mods?

Firmware is almost always written in C.


Jun 3, 2018

What would happen if Microsoft buys GitHub?

There is a cultural thing here; Github contributors are Open Source fanatics. The Open Source community has bad blood with Microsoft. All those open source repos will come down for no other purpose than to signal contempt for Redmond.

Microsoft’s cloud rival - Google - would likely step up and deploy a rival hub. The Open Source nuts (myself included) would migrate over to it by midnight.

Microsoft would end up hosting private repositories to the Enterprise, and the “Real Github” would live on in Google’s servers.

It doesn’t matter how generous and nice Microsoft tries to be, the hatred of MS is genetic at this point throughout the Open Source world.

In the end, MS would not get their money’s worth. Quoth Alexandra Pell , “It’s like Monsanto buying whole foods.”

Edit (the day after the announcement by MS : It looks like Gitlab is the biggest beneficiary of the flight from Github. Repositories from Github have been landing at Gitlab at a rate of > 2,000/hr. Grafana)


Jun 3, 2018

As a GitHub contributor, will you move to a different platform if Microsoft acquires GitHub? Why or why not?

Bloomberg says it’s a done deal, I am in the process of migrating to Gitlab, who somehow seems to be expecting me …

Well played.


Jun 3, 2018

Why do you think White privilege does NOT exist? What arguments can be made against the concept?

I’m not concerned with ‘Privilege’. The republic wasn’t founded to grant you any privileges. It defends your rights.

Those rights are clearly laid out in the law. We don’t need any new words to describe them.

If ‘privilege’ is identical to ‘rights’, then you are talking about ‘White rights’ which sounds pretty strange, doesn’t it? Rights are color-blind, however out of fashion that may sound. The rights of all people must be defended.

If ‘privilege’ is distinct from rights - which of course it is - then I don’t care about your privileges. The constitution never guaranteed you any of the items in the white backpack. Opening a magazine and seeing your race represented, finding a band-aid your skin color - you don’t get that stuff. Sorry about that.

Nobody’s great-grandson owes you recompense for what their ancestor did to your ancestor. You can’t have some rich kid’s money. You can’t even coerce the bigot not to eye you suspiciously for walking your dog at night.

That’s just not the deal America ever offered you. It’s not what the president swears to defend, nor what our veterans fought for. As a country we strive for equal rights - however imperfectly.

Inequity of “privilege” is the necessary burden of living in a free society.

If you want to equalize something other than rights, well, you’re in the wrong country. The vast majority of us - of all skin colors - are not going to consent to rewriting the constitution.

You haven’t had some epiphany, become ‘woke’, and must now grimly engage in endless debate with a nation filled with mostly older, mostly white people who just don’t get it, that you might drag a blind electorate to the glaring light of truth.

You’re just wasting your time. Which is a sad thing for a young person with a rebellious spirit to do.


Jun 3, 2018

What is your replacement plan for your GitHub repo if Microsoft acquires, if any?

My code (the Quora plugins) has just landed in its new home on gitlab.com

Fork me me here chris reiss .


Jun 4, 2018

Will Microsoft ruin GitHub?

I don’t think Microsoft will do anything to ruin Github.

Github’s more-or-less a fait accompli . It works fine as is and you could freeze functionality right now. Its users are highly technical and don’t want a bunch of new features; most interact with it through a command line.

But when I said MS won’t do anything to ruin it, I was being trixy. I’m actually part of today’s mass evacuation to Gitlab (GitLab Sees Huge Traffic Spike After News of Microsoft Buying GitHub).

Because it’s not what they’ll likely do, it’s :

What they did. They bought Github in the first place. And they’ve waged sustained war against the Open Source community since 2000; from spreading FUD about Linux to an endless barrage of patent suits against OS vendors. Don’t get me started, Christopher Reiss's answer to Why do many people love Steve Jobs more than Bill Gates, even though Gates is generally acknowledged to be a nicer person?

What they just might do. They might go crawling through repositories - even private ones - giving them unprecedented surveillance into their competitor’s code. They might make an effort to bifurcate the Git standard for their Enterprise customers. All sorts of mischief is imaginable.

I can express my disapproval of what they did, and relieve my concerns over what they just might do by moving my repositories. I’m not at all alone in this.

Thousands of Open Source projects are doing the same, already some big ones. Abhijeet Pratap Singh (अभिजीत सिंह)'s answer to What major Open Source projects are considering leaving Github as a result of Microsoft's acquisition?

Microsoft may be killing Github through the very act of acquiring it.


Jun 4, 2018

Is there a mass exodus of projects from GitHub happening after the announcement of the Microsoft Acquisition?

edit ( 8:00 pm EST 6/4) : Import statistics are finally available again, showing a startling influx :

Rough eye-ball calculus shows a 100x increase in new repositories, at a rate of about 5,000 per hr as compared to their usual 50 per hr.

During the last 24 hours, about 120,000 repositories have come over.

Yes.

Gitlab seems to be the primary refugee destination. At 5 AM they reported that thousands of repositories per hour were being imported from Github; this was before the formal MS announcement and before the East Coast even woke up.

Since then, numbers aren’t available as their servers struggle to keep up (right now the page takes 5–10 seconds to load). They created a new twitter account just to report on the whole epic saga,

movingtogitlab (@movingtogitlab) | Twitter

To their credit, they got in front of things and rolled out the red carpet :

Some projects close to Ubuntu like Gnome and Gimp have moved off already. No telling what the final toll will be, and to what extent network effects will pull further projects over.


Jun 4, 2018

Why are some GitHub repositories moving to GitLab? Why are the repository owners afraid of Microsoft acquisition of GitHub?

MS has a history of attacking the Open Source community through legal action, misleading propaganda, and a whole slew of … dirty tricks.

To be fair, they’ve stopped that. But to be even fairer, they only stopped when it aligned with their business interests. When it was clear that they would lose the server software market, and that desktop doesn’t matter. When they shifted to cloud services, where Open Source was the primary demand.

Repentance is suspect when it is profitable. We have zero reason to believe that Microsoft will do the right - but less profitable - thing when nobody is looking. When they have root access to Github at midnight.


Jun 4, 2018

What are the funniest memes about Microsoft's purchase of Github?

My favorite so far,

Time magazine is all over this : Microsoft Bought GitHub. The Clippy Jokes Escalated Quickly.

Not a meme per se, but a tweet :

And The Office :


Jun 4, 2018

Why aren’t developers happy with Microsoft’s acquisition of Github?

To c/p myself from an ars technica comment thread,

"The essential problem is this : While Microsoft has changed their hostile and obstructive posture toward Open Source, they only did so when it aligned with their business interests. Not a moment before.
Only after they lost the battle with Open Source, and had to abandon their model of proprietary software for the Cloud/Web in favor of OS-agnostic Cloud Services, did they relent. Not a day before.
So it seems to many devs that they did the right thing only because the wrong thing stopped making money. There's no evidence of actual ethics." — me

MS has a track record of doing as much wrong as they could profitably get away with. We don’t trust them with root access to our private repositories.


Jun 5, 2018

How do software developers deal with team conflicts about naming conventions and coding styles?

First, look for a broadly used standard style for that language. Make sure it is supported by automatic tools to find and fix variance from that style. Maybe with a sweet Eclipse plugin that helps as you type.

For instance, Python has PEP8, which comes with a checker - pep8 as well as Eclipse support.

Javascript has JavaScript Standard Style . You get the idea.

Sometimes, you need to go a little further, especially if the language is a complex one. Say, C++. A good trick here is to adopt the style conventions of a big, established, open source project. A project that supplies the style tools you’ll need.

For C++, you can grab webkit’s style guide and tools.

In short, be unoriginal and lazy. Do what others are doing and steal their short-cuts for doing it.


Jun 5, 2018

What are the advantages for Microsoft of acquiring GitHub?

First, of course : It puts Github on solid financial ground. Github was losing money and now has a second lease on life.

Second, it validates the value of a “source hub”. (Github wasn’t just a place to stash your code, but evolved into a network of coders who interacted and built reputation.) It shows investors and potential investors that even if the hub loses money, the community it holds can be a multi-billion dollar asset.

So that increases the cash flows into alternatives like Gitlab.

Third, it’s shaking up the ecosystem. Source control isn’t something that people really think about changing. Once we’re plugged in to any one system, we tend to stay there.

All the pissed off developers fleeing Github are getting their first taste of alternatives - mostly Gitlab. They’re finding that Gitlab is more than just a code repository; it has tools covering the whole development cycle integrating documentation, testing, bug tracking, etc.

And just this morning Gitlab made the (freakin’ brilliant) move of offering their top-tier, $100/mo service free to all Open Source projects.

Everybody wins.


Jun 5, 2018

Will Microsoft have access to private GitHub repo code? What kind of trust is being established?

Yes, of course they have technical access to private repositories. They will have root access to the file system. Source isn’t encrypted.

They are, however, bound by their terms of service not to look at it.

I’ll leave you to google “Microsoft privacy violation” and reach your own conclusions.


Jun 5, 2018

I believe America 60 years ago (i.e. 1958) was better than today, since there were no SJWs and political correctness. How can we return the U.S to those good old times?

You’re talking about a period when America was in the grips of mass paranoia; villains were said to lurk in our midst, careers were destroyed by even a rumor of dissent from the dominant polemic; Courts with no legal authority held show trials whose verdicts were foregone conclusions. It was a time of fear and suspicion where America briefly turned its back on the very freedoms that define us.

And then there was McCarthysm, which had no Twitter.


Jun 6, 2018

What exactly is the onclick of a DOM object in JS? I've seen it being called as the onclick property, but isn't it a method? I tried calling .onclick() after assigning a function to it and it worked just like a method with no click.

In Soviet JavaScript, onclick() calls YOU. (Couldn’t resist.)

onclick is a callback. If you define an onclick(), that code will be called when the user clicks. Try it out by saying,

var el = document.getElementById('<my-ojbect-id>') // like this ('button_1');

el.onclick = function () {alert('Hey! I felt that!');}

Calling onclick() itself won’t do anything, but you can programmtically click the button like this :

el.click();


Jun 6, 2018

To date, how many Github repositories have been moved to Gitlab since the Microsoft buy-out was announced?

I’ll try to come back daily to update.

Jun 6, ’18 : ~ 225,000 Repositories.

Using eyeball calculus to sum under the graph, the daily breakdown is

6/4 100K

6/5 75K

today 50K

Source : Grafana


Jun 6, 2018

What is the smartest thing Microsoft could do with Github?

I think Microsoft is in denial how hostile a great many FOSS people are to them ( Reasons not to use Microsoft ~ Richard Stallman).

They need to realize this; and that in retrospect the purchase may not have been a wise one. (They don’t need to admit that publically, just to themselves.) A quarter million repositories have left Github for Gitlab in 3 days, Christopher Reiss's answer to To date, how many Github repositories have been moved to Gitlab since the Microsoft buy-out was announced? .

The bleeding so far has been projects small enough to find time during a work week to halt development. The really big repositoriess won’t begin to move until this weekend at the earliest.

So that’s the situation. Open source devs don’t like and don’t trust them. Given that, a couple of simple things come to mind :

Appoint a governance board who are elected in some sensible way by the community, whose actions are transparent and who stand for re-election. They and they alone uphold privacy rights on non-public code. (Yea, I know, that isn’t in Microsoft’s Mitochondria.)

Put some effort into Open Source projects without a direct benefit to Microsoft. (Not Microsoft virtualization, for instance. Rather, areas of maximum benefit to the whole ecosystem.)

Throw some testers and tech writers at FOSS. The poorer parts of the world could benefit from translators to help with localizing UIs and docs.

Something like that. This is a community that has sacrificed material gain for the greater good. Microsoft tried to kill it. Now they say they ’ve changed and are more like us.

Fair enough. Then do like us:

Give.


Jun 7, 2018

What will software development be like in ten years?

I think there’s a good chance that a drastic revolution may occur. Not in technology but in management.

Since 2000 or so, we got really, really lazy about how we manage people.

First, hiring. Defining and detecting software talent is hard. We know that A-players will usually hire A-players. But B-players hire C-players (Steve Jobs calls this the “bozo explosion” What I Learned From Steve Jobs).

What if we don’t know who the A-players are !? Not just when we hire them, but when we see them every day? How do we decide someone is doing great work?

This question is the cross-roads every organization faces. There’s two essential paths to take.

Shrug. Admit this is a hard question without a general answer. Keep worrying about how you decide this. About who is advising you in these decisions. About the bad people you might falsely elevate, and the good people you’re missing . About the role your day-to-day culture plays in all this (is something obstructing otherwise good people?) About … fuck - how good are you in the first place? Should you be making these decisions at all?

Fuck it up with metrics and blame the organization for failing. This is the near universal approach today, especially as companies get large. It’s so much easier. Fucking up always is.

Interviews : Easy! Give everyone the same coding test. Compare the scores. You can even have a non technical person do a “phone screen” so you make sure you’re talking to only “good people.” Sure, the coding test is nothing - at all - like what they’ll actually be doing, but hey - gotta make some concessions to pragmatism. Can’t get bogged down in the hiring process! We have to onboard quickly because 25% of our hires can’t cut it. That’s how hard-core we are. We should probably make that test harder.

Performance: Same problem, only we have a year of their work to look at. Metrics! How many bugs closed? Lines of code? Did they break trunk? Oh - let’s ask their 5 nearest coworkers - who also came on board this year, to provide ‘360 feedback’. OK, now we got 10 Key Performance Indicators. This management thing … it’s science, really. Try to keep up.

Agile : We’re Agile, baby! We have story points, and we’re watching who is knocking those points down on a daily basis. Check this out, it’s called a burn-down chart. Every morning I meet with the team and update this thing. You feelin the burn? Sometimes we base the story points on the Fibonacci Sequence. Oh yea. We’re droppin some math up in here. I’m Stephen Fucking Hawking at this management shit. With Agile, don’t worry - we are all over these developers every minute making sure the job gets done. Somebody slacks, we’re on em at the next morning standup. We take Agile seriously.

I won’t say the second path is flawed, or that it doesn’t work. It never tried to work, there was never a possibility of it working. It is broken at each and every stage. But it creates a flurry of activity that very much resembles doing stuff.

You literally couldn’t break it any more if you tried.

The result is that your developers find a way around this staggering waterfall of metric-driven idiocy to get the job done, or they don’t. And the success rate is about 50%. 50 % of software projects still fail within their stated constraints.

Nobody ever mentions that the success rate was also 50% in 1995. That zero progress has been made in the intervening 20 years since these practices were incepted. That you could take JIRA and the standups and the metrics and pipe them all to /dev/null along with your lower 2 levels of management and half your recent hires and the organization would actually speed up slightly.

Alas, this has been a very expensive failure and a very dismal environment in which to work. I suspect a great many devs join startups just to get away from it.

As software continues to go over-budget, as good developers leave (often they are “so so” here but stars in their next job - guess what changed?), as bad developers keep slipping through the linked-list-reversal interview, I think we might hit a point of “Paradigm fatigue”, where organizations throw off this way of working, or lose out to bolder competitors who do.

In the next ten years, we may see this model finally collapse and be replaced by a more humble realism that rejects easy answers and embraces hard questions.


Jun 7, 2018

How do you read the "->" symbol after a pointer in C++?

Wow.

I just realized that in 23 years, not once have I read -> out loud. Mind blown.

If I did, I'd probably cheat with "dot" (since a->b is sugar for (*a).b)


Jun 7, 2018

Why do Americans have such terrible work ethic?

Americans work harder than anybody else in the industrialized world.

Americans Work More Than Anyone


Jun 7, 2018

What can we descendants of American settlers do to atone to natives for the genocide of the Native American population?

Nobody owes anybody anything because of what their ancestors did.

If they did, they wouldn’t owe it to you.

People who make this claim are doing what they revile most in the oppressors : exploiting the suffering of others for personal gain.


Jun 8, 2018

What are some great tricks to enhance Google searches?

Here’s a trick:

We all know that we can surround a “phrase with quotes like this” to make sure that phrase appears verbatim in the result.

You can also put quotes around a single word to enforce that the word must be present, like “this”. Intuitively, that this is the most important word in the query.


Jun 8, 2018

Why is Quora so politically leftist?

Too many rhetorical political questions.


Jun 8, 2018

Why was France useless and immediately surrendered to Germany during WWII?

Oh, the French deserve better than that.

There was really no possible defense against Blitzkrieg except time, great distance, or water.

The carefully coordinated, fast-moving front was behind you almost as soon as you saw it. It rolled over trenches. Rained bombs on infantry. Deployed thousands of troops within minutes.

There was just no way to stop it while it was moving. But like a shark, it had to keep moving or it would perish.

It took not armies, but geography - the English Channel and the Russian Steppes - to bring the shark to a stop. The French succumbed not to cowardice, but to novel and overwhelming military technology along with 20 other countries similarly occupied.

Once occupied, a great many in the French undergound sacrificed themselves to provide critical intelligence and conduct sabotage.


Jun 8, 2018

My professor called me a 'whiny vegan' and the entire class cheered. How come no one protests a professor being so offensive? Why is the world like this?

You can and should expect to be offended in a free society.

Freedom is offensive. The idea of government-by-the-people is that the individual is tough enough and capable enough to handle it.

Generations of Americans have proven that they are.

Your turn.


Jun 9, 2018

What is the most useful and widely used open source code?

A couple of good answers mention the Linux Kernel; I’d say it’s a close tie between that and the WebKit/Blink browser engines.

A majority of browsers, both desktop and mobile are based on this engine. (Chrome, Safari, and a bunch of little ones like Brave, Puffin, Opera, etc.)

Funny how the two biggest contenders are either way down at the bottom or way at the top of the software stack.


Jun 9, 2018

I’m currently a high school student. I want to get a PhD in Theoretical (aka Pure) Mathematics, but I don't know what to specialize in. What are some popular math specializations and why?

I couldn’t possibly help you on this. But I did get a bachelor’s in math, so I know enough math to know who could help you on this. Paging ‎Alon Amit (אלון עמית)‎


Jun 9, 2018

What is one of the weirdest events to take place during the American Revolution?

When the Revolutionary War first broke out, at the battle of Concord there was a guy locally famous for not playing with a full deck, named Elias Brown. Brown brought with him a couple barrels of hard apple cider.

He walked right across the battle-field, serving up cider first to one side, then the other.

Being unarmed and not entirely in possession of his mental faculties, nobody wanted to risk shooting the poor guy. So both sides just took a break from fighting, had themselves a cup of cider, and waited for crazy old Elias to finish up and clear the field.


Jun 10, 2018

What is something that needs to be said about vaping?

It saves lives.

While concern about underage vaping and absence of clinical long-term data is certainly valid, it’s the first nicotine substitute that has smokers quitting in really huge numbers.

We should be urging smokers to try it, and perhaps even subsidizing it (it’ll pay for itself in reduced lung cancer cases.)

The Brits are ahead of the US on this - NHS (National Institute of Health) :

Long-term vaping 'far safer than smoking' says 'landmark' study

This may be the biggest boon to public health in a generation.


Jun 11, 2018

If a car runs at the speed of light, will the headlights work?

You wouldn’t have time to find out!

If somehow you got your car going at the speed of light, your local time stops completely. Whatever trip you’re making is instantaneous. There’s no time to flick on the lights.

“Ahhh”, you say, “I’d turn them on first!”.

OK, but you’d have no time to observe what they did. And the lights would have no time to emit photons.

Nothing on the car would work : Seat warmers, windshield wiper blades; the car’s state would be frozen at that instant.

Also, you’ve got infinite mass-energy so the whole universe would be destroyed.


Jun 11, 2018

Why do most programmers prefer dark UI in IDE's ?

Aside from the eye-strain that others mention, us old-timers remember the day that screens turned white. Apple was first; the Mac was trying to emulate the look of paper.

Coders stare at code more intensely than perhaps anybody stares at anything; While Apple’s shift made sense for prose, it never made sense for code.

Unlike prose, a white background isn’t true to code’s historical roots. Most code started life looking like this on “dumb terminals” :


Jun 11, 2018

Can you hide all anonymous answers from your Quora feed?

Yep - use this plugin I wrote, ominax.com/qure


Jun 12, 2018

Under what circumstances, if any, would you consider it reasonable to break traffic laws driving to the hospital in lieu of calling an ambulance?

Oh - just about any time when a few minutes could mean death. Just make sure you’re a level-headed person and a good driver.

You have to consider the possibility of causing an accident along the way, and that you might be too panicky to drive safely.

But if you can keep your cool and somebody is having a heart-attack - there’s a reason there isn’t a 1 year jail term for speeding. Hit the gas, roll carefully (and slowly) through red lights and get the person to a hospital.

If a cop sees you, there’s a good chance he will understand you’re heading for the hospital, pull in front of you and turn on his flashers of you to provide you an escort. Stay on his tail.


Jun 14, 2018

What does x²+y²+z²-c²t²=0 tell us other than light being max speed? How does it change when gravity is involved? What are related important equations for finding time differences between moving bodies, and is there a name for the equation?

Your exam is not going to be this easy to outsource.


Jun 14, 2018

By tacitly endorsing Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars and other ‘Alt-Fact’ channels, or at least appreciating that they "fire up the base", has the GOP created a monster it can no longer control?

No.

The reason “fake news” is so prevalent is that each side thinks the other side’s news is fake.

But neither side is telling you the truth. They are telling you what you want to hear. Because people return to a site that confirms their beliefs. (And then serves up the usual distractions like sex scandals or ethnic conflict.)

To quote from the classic 70’s film Network,

But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. … We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. … This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! — Network (1976)

If you want to reign in the monster of Fake News, challenge news stories which affirm your beliefs. Just because they accord with your world view doesn’t make the story true.

For example, the gender pay gap. Where does that come from? Does it mean a woman makes less money than an equally experienced and educated guy working next to her? (Spoiler : She doesn’t, and that number is easy to check.)

The New York Times says https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/us/a-third-of-college-women-experience-unwanted-sexual-contact-study-finds.html . Is that true? Who says? Who checked? (1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus)

Are blacks more likely to be killed in an encounter with police? Again - Who says? Who checked?

This photo of Trump at the G7, you saw it, right?

Bet you didn’t see this one, taken a few seconds later :

Fake news is serving up bullshit to both sides. Not because they are evil. But for the simple reason that it sells.

And it sells because most of us never, ever, not even once - fact check something that bolsters our world view.

We’re the ones who need to get real.


Jun 16, 2018

What do you do when you can't find the root cause of the bug in your program?

Turn off your monitor. There’s your problem.

That’s you. Your reflection anyway.

You believe something that’s not true.

Ages ago, I was writing “hello world” in C. I compiled it and ran it and nothing happened. Looked at the code. Seemed OK. No errors.

Just nothing happened when I ran it.

After a couple of hours of frustration, I took a look at what I was doing as if I was from another planet.

I had written my program in an editor. I then typed the Unix command

cc -o tt myprogram.c

And then I’d type ‘tt’ to run the program.

But I believed something. Something that wasn’t true. That when I typed ‘tt’ it was executing my ‘tt’ program.

There was another program called ‘tt’ that took precedence in my path. It was the terminal program itself, short for “teletype”.

Turns out you can’t call a program ‘tt’ on that system.

My code was fine, the problem was in my head. Now, the actual problem is most often in your code, but the reason you can’t see it is that you have a mistaken belief in your head.

This was observed before computer programming, in the old days of electrical engineering. They used the phrase a “short between the ears.”

So stop staring at the code, and start examining your beliefs about the code.


Jun 16, 2018

What's the point of majoring in mathematics as calculators replace mathematicians nowadays?

I majored in math. I hardly ever did any arithmetic. When I did, I’d usually do it wrong. I was pretty good though; I had a knack for finding an unexpectedly simple and brief proof to a theorem, often by observing some hidden symmetry in the problem. My prof would circle my mistake in adding 4 plus 4 at the end of a passably elegant proof and laugh. He might knock a token point off; usually he wouldn’t. I was his favorite student.

Math majors study form, structure and beauty. We rarely juggle numbers any bigger than 2. Many of us are pretty awful at computation.


Jun 17, 2018

What are the perks that a software engineer should have?

Software engineers often find themselves in Crunch Mode, where disaster looms and everyone has to work pretty much round-the-clock to make something happen.

Of all places, Microsoft had a manager who made a critical realization about this : Give devs recovery time when it’s over.

Give them a day where nobody is allowed to come to work or even log in. Or a few half days in a row. They need to recharge, go out and get stinking drunk, sleep in, spend time with their partner and kids and goldfish, catch up on cartoons.

And it doesn’t hurt to pick up the tab for a nice dinner for them and a +1.

This really isn’t too expensive given all the extra time they put in; it lets them recharge their batteries and goes a long way to defuse the resentment that tends to build up when people must sacrifice their personal lives just to earn a living.


Jun 19, 2018

What kind of programmer are you?

Subversive.


Jun 19, 2018

As a programmer, have you ever used an algorithm to do something more efficiently in real life?

Yes, I make frequent use of a ‘cache’ in real life.

I have a toolbox with all sorts of tools, organized into type and size so i can search for just the tool I need.

But I break this system deliberately by not putting a tool back in its correct location. Instead, I put in a compartment for just ‘recently used’ tools. Because a recently used item is most likely to be needed again.

Your computer’s file system does the same thing.


Jun 20, 2018

Is there race discrimination in the IT field?

Less so than in other fields, I think.

In the coding part of IT at least, there a couple of dynamics at work which keep things grounded in objective reality.

Unlike, say, student reviews of a teacher, a programmer’s performance results in an objective product - code.

And more than this, the code is a “white box”. A plumber can come fix your sink - but all you know when he’s done is whether the sink works or not. You can’t see the welds, materials, and marks of craftsmanship.

With code it’s different - all the inner workings are laid bare. So if someone is better and/or faster than me, that is immediately apparent from working with them. Sure, some of the aesthetic of ‘quality code’ is subjective, but it certainly isn’t race-based.

Thus if I’ve got a position to fill, and I find someone better than me - I’ll try to hire them. Race or gender doesn’t factor into that decision at all. If another employer is letting that cloud their judgement, I’d love to sift through their pool of rejects and compete directly against them.

As to the socioeconomic barriers facing minorities in order to develop that skill in the first place, that’s a different story.


Jun 20, 2018

Have you ever solved the Rubik's Cube?

Sure, the solution was published way back in the early 80’s, and it became a Thing to Just Do with your hands. We’d even take the thing apart and apply talcum powder so it would move faster.

As for anyone solving it by just thinking really hard, that is really beyond human capacity unless you already know at least a partial general solution, have studied Group Theory, or slowly and methodically rediscover the key principles of Group Theory that you’ll need. And forget getting lucky, those numbers don’t work.

Interestingly, your only hope of solving it is to devise a general method that can always solve any cube. Attempting to solve any specific, sufficiently scrambled cube is a blind alley. The problem yields at a higher level of abstraction.


Jun 21, 2018

What do you HATE about PHP?

It’s ad-hoc syntax reeks of 1980.

Using a $-sign in front of variable names was a short-cut to make things dumb simple for the language parser. It is now a curse that every PHP programmer must endure with each grim new dawn.

And using a ‘.’ to concatenate strings is an act of psychotic depravity.


Jun 21, 2018

How can I solve a twisty puzzle, like the Rubik's cube variants, without having to look up algorithms other people have come up with?

Here’s a simple principle that can take you a long way with such puzzles.

Call any operation, say turning the top face of a rubik’s cube 90 degrees clockwise, F.

Turning it twice is F^2. Turning it counter-clockwise is F^{-1}.

Another operation, say turning the side facing you clockwise 90 degrees, we might call G.

We can write two subsequent operations like this : F G

You can try for yourself and find this isn’t commutative, that is F G != G F .

Some people find that a little unintuitive, so keep it in mind.

Now here’s the trick. Consider the operation -

F G F^{-1}

Now repeat the 3-step operation, to give F G F^{-1}F G F^{-1} = F G^2 F^{-1}

More generally, [F G F^{-1}]^n = F G^n F^{-1}

Many solutions to the rubiks cube do nothing but this - a long series of operations, a single inner operation (or brief burst of operations), and then undoing all of the first series in reverse order. Why this property of ‘inner composition’ is so useful I’ll leave to you (I really can’t think of a good explanation.)

By the way, at this point you’re about halfway to knowing what a Group is.


Jun 22, 2018

Why are Firefox and Chrome so laggy on Linux?

They shouldn’t be.

If they are, you are probably low on resources (and would be much worse off on Windows). You can take some steps to speed things up :

Use a desktop manager that doesn’t compete with the browser for display time. The Mate Desktop is the one I currently use, it looks great but doesn’t waste resources on glitzy animations - MATE Desktop Environment , Ubuntu MATE is a heavyweight among the lightweight distributions

Use Firefox, which conserves RAM much better than Chrome.

If you must have Chrome, either avoid keeping lots of tabs open, use a plugin to put tabs to sleep like The Great Suspender, or turn off Chrome’s multiprocessing by using the command line option —single-process.

Enable GPU acceleration on your browser Enable Hardware Acceleration In Chrome / Chromium Browser [Quick Tip], https://cialu.net/enable-hardware-acceleration-firefox-make-faster/

Use my super cool plugins for Quora at Iridiumblue's liquid-cooled plugin factory. .

OK, that last one won’t speed you up, that was just a shameless plug.


Jun 22, 2018

Can you write a hidden message in a code that only other programmers will be able to understand?

Nobody does this anymore, but way back in the old days hackers would sometimes put

#0d

At the top of a piece of spyware, or some related communication. It looks like nothing, maybe a stray hex code - but to the initiated it warned/bragged of a Zero-day (computing) - Wikipedia .

(In those days as well, people hacked not to destroy or exploit, but for the sheer fun of it. So alerting your friends like this isn’t quite as assinine as it would be now.)


Jun 22, 2018

If someone had a gun to your head and said “tell me a fast fact or die”, what would you say?

Prison food sucks.


Jun 23, 2018

Who wants to attend a Quora meetup/event this fall (late Sept/early Oct period) in the Maryland-- DC--Baltimore area? (First to respond gets first priority on location of actual event!)

^ East coasters in the house!

? Alexandra Pell

?

Gary Teal
(We probably would rather wait for a NY/Boston one, but just throwing it out there …)


Jun 24, 2018

What was your first computer like in comparison to the computer you have today?

Like Sam Walker, my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.

You needed a spare TV to use as a monitor.

This thing came out in 1982, and it Changed Everything. It was just 100 bucks. This meant that any high school kid, making the minimum wage of $3.35, could save up for a week and buy one.

Built for the budding programmer, its membrane keyboard actually had predictive typing for BASIC, saving many mushy and tedious keystrokes.

In terms of computing power, it put out somewhere in the ballpark of 1MegaFLOP (1 million floating point ops/second.)

My current rig is an old HP workstation, a WX4400 :

It exists mostly to supply power, data, and emotional support to an NVidia GPU (thanks Jay Yadawa !) being used as a Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) :

This system is capable of performing about 130 Gigaflops for code carefully optimised for massively parallel processing. My code is well optimized, so I get to run at near 100% that capacity.

That makes my current machine 130 GFlops/ 1MFlop = 100,000 times more powerful.

To visualize that difference, if you consider me at age 15 when I got that Timex Sinclair, you would likely have seen me on a ten-speed with a backpack. I could cover about 5 miles in a hour (hilly where I grew up), weighed about 150 lbs with full backpack.

(Nobody wore helmets back then.)

So that’s 150 lbs transported 5 miles = 750 pound-miles.

In order to match the increase in transportation power with my increase in computing power, I’d need to multiply that by 100,000.

That is, I’d have an F-16 fighter jet.

It’s been a cool ride.


Jun 24, 2018

What is the greatest evil in life?

Failure to spread the wealth. Really, the progress.

We don’t have proper food, health care, shelter, education and safety for about half the human race. We should really expend the energy we poured into, say, World War II and devote ourselves to fixing that within a generation.

On a related note, not to get all Marxist on y’all, but a great deal of wealth amassed in European countries has been extracted by force from places like Africa, India, East Asia, South America and so on.

It would not be an unthinkably subversive act to recognize that fact, and act to return some of this wealth to support public infrastructure in the areas hit hardest by Imperialism. Debt forgiveness would be a good start.

And it wouldn’t be sacrilege to make certain symbolic concessions like pulling the Koh-i-Noor diamond out of the Queen’s crown and returning it to India. (Does she really need that thing there !?)

Look at it this way: If aliens landed tomorrow, and surveyed the whole planet, what would their impression of us be?

Would you be ashamed of the malnourished people? All the victims of curable diseases? The children without eyeglasses?

Me too.

Let’s make a world we can be proud of.


Jun 24, 2018

Why, when I ask a question on Quora, do people answer it and then go on to give me a sermon?

Quora is not really a Q and A site; it’s a writing platform.

The questions serve as jumping-off points for articles. Good answers address the question, but they also take great liberties in going broader.

This dynamic has emerged from the readers, not the writers. The readers heavily upvoted such answers, encouraging the writers to provide them.

For example, someone once asked why Nokia makes such durable phones. I wrote an answer and was shocked to see it trend immediately; it now has almost 20,000 upvotes.

Christopher Reiss's answer to Why are Nokia phones stereotyped as being indestructible?

I didn’t say a word about Nokia manufacturing or their supply chain. I spoke about Nokia’s homeland - Finland. About the Finnish people and their love of endurance. About World War II and architecture and a Finnish word called Sisu.

Quora’s not an encyclopedia of answers. It’s a massive and growing collection of essays.


Jun 24, 2018

What's the easiest but most deadly mistake to make on a motorcycle?

Failure to assume that leaves on the road are like an oil slick.

I once watched two motorcycles try to turn onto a highway. The on-ramp had a layer of recently fallen leaves on it. Not enough static friction to hold the bike up while it was leaning into a turn.

They both wiped out simultaneously.

Sand is almost as bad.


Jun 24, 2018

Is a mid-level programmer with good ideas to solve problems or create a new solution, a position in a development team?He writes algorithms or applications in C++ then give it to a C++ expert for optimization or possible bug fixes?

It’s possible, but in my experience :

People with truly great ideas acquire the skills to implement them well. Because getting good at code is much, much, much easier than creating a novel and useful algorithm.

And again, only in my meandering experience - people who can’t code well lack the intellectual discipline and self-criticism to actually come up with important algorithms; what they possess is the naivety to trust their first hunch as opposed to the critical quality-filter that can spot the 1 good hunch out of a 100.

Even in math-heavy fields like deep learning, you won’t find ivory-tower types throwing matrices over the wall at coders. Almost all the important works were coded by their inventors.

Because as you build the thing you find you need to modify the original design. More bluntly, that your original idea was wrong, but is a first step to something right. That’s if you’re lucky. More commonly, you find out your original idea is rubbish.

What results is a messy feedback loop. In deep learning we call these mid-course corrections “hyper-parameters” to give the impression that we didn’t stumble toward our solution, when in fact that’s exactly what happened.

Even Michelangelo pulled himself up a very ordinary ladder, lifted a common brush, made mistakes and arrived some distance from his original vision.


Jun 24, 2018

Why are you asking me a question when you know so much more than me?

None of the questions on Quora are directed at you.

Nobody asked you anything.


Jun 24, 2018

What would you do if you found questionable photographs while snooping through your significant other’s phone?

Seek psychiatric help in order to never repeat my criminal and immoral invasion of a person’s privacy. A victim who trusted me, along with all their friends.


Jun 25, 2018

What would be the mathematical probability of two raindrops fall on the ground on the Earth with the exact same number of atoms in it during 4 billion years time?

Good question!

It is very close to 1, see the Birthday problem - Wikipedia.

In fact, we can be fairly certain that two such raindrops have hit two different people - still alive - on the head!

You don’t need to use the precise calculation for the Birthday Problem, you can use the heuristic that as the # of possible matches exceeds 1/p where p is probability of a match, the probability tips > 0.5 or somethingish.

Guessing that a rain drop is about a gram of water, from How many molecules are present in 1 gram of water?

That makes

3.3455 x 10^22 ~ 10^22 molecules per drop.

Assuming a uniform distribution of # molecules (a worst case scenario), we get p = 10 ^ -22.

Given an earthly population of 10 billion, or 10 ^ 10, the number of possible matches is of the order n^2, or 10^20

OK, so there is only a 1% chance that two such drops have hit two people on the head. Oh! But we forgot to multiply by the number of drops a person gets hit with over their lifetime! So this zooms right up to ~1 very quickly.

And forget 4 billion years, this easily happens within a year.


Jun 25, 2018

What do you think is the future of Blockchain in the next 5-10 years?

The very word Blockchain became a rather sinister marketing ploy.

I will coin a term here so I can be clearer; by Blockchain I’m referring to the Ethereum smart-contract system at the highest level of abstraction, and Bitcoin and other cryptos at the lowest.

The critical feature the Blockchain possesses is that it is locked down by miners using Proof of Work (POW) and it is absolutely immutable.

The new term I’ll use is Bullchain, which is the marketing lie that we can extract the decentralized certainty of Blockchain but retain regulatory or corporate control, not rely on miners, and/or allow for mutability.

That’s bullshit. It’s not a bad idea, rather it’s a non idea. Someone is trying to sell your own shared database back to you with a new sticker on it.

I predict the Bullchain will perish over the next 5–10 years. Not because people will wake up to the bullshit, but rather they will see no return on their investment and stop funding the bullshitters.

Ethereum will continue to charge ahead, along with the cryptocurrencies, on their inexorable course to replacing a healthy portion of the global economy.

Blockchain will take on the meaning I’m using here.


Jun 27, 2018

For vaping, is it okay to just buy VG from a pharmacy and mix it with bottled water? Will it hurt me or destroy my vape pen?

Whoa, slow your roll, pump your breaks, don’t do that.

Water will zorch your coils, your electronics, and maybe even asplode your vape.

Commercial grade ejuices contains only tiny amounts of water.

OK, as for VG, as long as it’s food grade you’re fine. Pure VG is a fine juice (though of course most ppl add nicotine and flavoring.)


Jun 27, 2018

If you had to choose between only using a linked list or an array for every program from here on out, which would you choose and why?

Linked list; arrays are basically broken since they are blocks of contiguous memory. They get too big to move or modify, they fragment your memory heap and inflict all sorts of suffering.

Now, it’s very hard to imagine programming without the notion of an associative array of some sort, but that’s a different story.

Huge blocks of memory break computers.

With a linked list you could put together a not-too-awful hash table that avoids arrays. That would become your virtual ‘array’.

All of which, of course, is entirely insane and hypothetical.

On a related note, linked lists are more natural, in some sense of the word.

Quick : In the alphabet, what is the 17′th letter?

Never mind.

Now : What letter comes after S ?

Yea. There’s a linked list in your brain.


Jun 27, 2018

Why is it a good idea to first write out an algorithm in a pseudo-code rather than jumping immediately to Python code?

It's not.

Your professor is lying. Nobody writes pseudocode. Ever.

Ever.

Love,

— every working programmer with > 3 years experience.


Jun 27, 2018

What are the most famous examples of pilot error in the history of aviation?

This was probably inevitable, but at first in WWII the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets was avoided. (With the exception of Poland, especially Warsaw.) Like mustard gas, bombing of cities was universally available and universally catastrophic. Everyone knew this, and like mustard gas they just left it alone. For a while the thing was : Don’t bomb cities.

Until a bunch of German pilots got lost and accidentally bombed London. Germany bombs British towns and cities

It would have been nice if Germany apologized, England accepted, and … Hah! Yea, right. Churchill and Hitler went batshit within days and each vowed to bomb each other into their subatomic particles.

Massive civilian air raids followed and the rest is rubble and tomb stones.


Jun 28, 2018

What would you do tomorrow, if you were elected as the United States president today?

I would announce that a plot was uncovered to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon in the DC area. The conspiracy runs deep; embedded foreign agents are active in all branches of government.

Then the White House would reveal photos of the bomb, which was intercepted aboard a tour bus outside the Smithsonian. It’s a very old warhead from the US’s own arsenal - a smaller bomb called W48, with a relatively low yield of 100 Tons. Analysis of the bomb indicates that it wouldn’t have detonated properly; the high explosive lenses had degraded over the years so the implosion would have been lopsided. It would have been a”fizzle” or a “dirty bomb”.

In response, I would invoke Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act to begin sweeping arrests throughout the government, certain elements of the press, and elsewhere. This would be an emergency measure until the immediate danger had passed. Most people arrested are just being detained for their own protection as part of the orderly evacuation of the Capitol.

Then comes the announcement that an anonymous tip led to the interception of an ambulance traveling at high speed with flashers and siren in Lincoln, VA. The ambulance was destroyed by an Apache helicopter when it refused to respond or yield. It was found to contain two fully functioning, much more powerful W50 warheads with yields of 400 kilotons - enough to easily vaporize the Capitol. The reason for the second bomb appears to have been a safeguard against a detonation misfire.

The chilling implication remains unspoken by my administration : If they have a spare warhead to sacrifice just for reliability - God knows how many they have in total. And how they got loose from the US arsenal.

Traitors in our midst.

The rather surreal detail that the driver was a mannequin; the ambulance appeared to be self-driving, leaks out but is not officially addressed. Media outlets are warned to avoid such speculation in the vital interests of national security.

An emergency session of (the docile, remants of ) Congress convenes to pass - unanimously - the Enduring Freedom Act which grants the presidency the ability to rule by decree for a period of four years, until the nuclear crisis has passed.

But it’s all lies.

There was never any bomb. The people who knew that were locked up before they could challenge it.

My last executive order would be for my arrest, where I am handcuffed during my press conference declaring,

“You are this close to fascism. I seized total power - toppled your democracy - with nothing but existing laws and a scary story. Because Habeas Corpus - the protection from arrest without due process - was suspended in the wake of 9/11. A lot of men died in battle to defend that protection.

We gave it away almost 2 decades ago in a panic over terrorism.

With my arrest today, you’re safe.

But until you restore the protections our Founding Fathers enshrined in the Constitution, you’re not free.

Just lucky.”

Students of World War II will recognize my story is just a modernized fictionalization of actual events during the collapse of German democracy and the rise of the Third Reich.


Jun 28, 2018

Why do irrational numbers exist? Why does math exist that is only conceptual and not applicable in nature?

(Quora technically doesn’t allow picture-only answers, this is a rare case where the picture needs no elaboration. And my lengthy and otherwise pointless mention of this gets around that rule on a technicality.)


Jun 28, 2018

If the universe is expanding, then what does it expand into? What do we call that space which accommodates the expanding universe?

It means this :

We launch an astronaut to the nearest star - Alpha Centauri. And for purposes of this example, that star isn’t moving away from us, unlike like all the other stars. It is not moving at all relative to Earth.

We can check this by observing in our space ship how hard we have to decelerate to come to a stop on Alpha Centauri. If we had to hit the break just as hard and long as we hit the gas, and accounting for gravity effects, the astronaut can radio back that indeed he is stationary with respect to Earth.

And we can time the message by echoing it immediately back to him, and he can measure the delay. So he can tell the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is 4 light years.

Some time later, he measures that again. The distance is slightly larger than last time. Even though neither reference frame accelerated in any direction, and they were relatively stationary to begin with, the distance between them has increased.

Distance is increasing between points not in relative motion. That’s the physical meaning of ‘expanding space’.


Jun 29, 2018

What is the tackiest thing you have ever seen at a funeral?

I was at my grandfather’s funeral, a person of some local prominence in Boston (A. Metcalf of BU infamy.)

Also at the funeral was an aunt of mine I hadn’t seen in a long time. She was not a person … given to being constrained … by social convention.

I sat next to her, and the room went completely quiet. She turned to me and said loud enough for about 15 people to hear,

“Jesus H Fucking Christ I haven’t worn a bra in 30 years. It’s like my tits are in a medieval torture device.”

“My goddamn tits. Jesus, my tits.”


Jun 30, 2018

Why do people who calls out 'SJWs' are more 'triggered' and 'snowflakes' than their targets?

“I know you are, but what am I?” does not comprise a political rebuttal.


Jul 2, 2018

Why can’t I ever seem to be able to have an intelligent discussion on feminism with non-feminists?

I have a trick which I’ve found to be a quite reliable indicator of whether someone is entering a debate willing and able to reason.

If they defend a certain doctrine - it could be anything at all - ask them what point of dissent they have from the majority of adherents to that doctrine.

Just one - a single point of dissent. Because if they don’t have one, they haven’t really thought about anything. Humans are disagreeable creatures; the only time we always agree is when we refuse to think.

For example, you can say that I’m an anti-feminist. Anti third wave, certainly. I am opposed to virtually the whole thing.

Where do I break from my cohorts? There is a problem in startup culture, the type that thrives in dorm rooms and coffee shops in Silicon Valley. Women aren’t included in the initial teams. Guys work with other guys, who reach out to guy investors, and everybody figures they’ll correct the gender bias later.

We need to fix that. That needs redress.

OK, that’s my point.

You’re a feminist? Great.

Your turn. If you can tell me where you break from typical orthodoxy, then i am pretty sure you and I could talk.

Now, I don’t want to - but feel free to steal my test and apply it elsewhere.

If you can’t come up with a single point of dissension - well.


Jul 3, 2018

The engine of my scooter always gets shut at red light or when I am running it slow. Why this issue is caused? Is this related to battery? I am having this issue for 2-3 years. I have a Hero Maestro (in India)?

It could be your idle speed is set too low.

Find your carburetor and try turning this screw. :

On some carburetors it looks instead like this :


Jul 4, 2018

Have you ever lost any respect for someone instantly?

In high school. A buddy of mine fancied himself as something of a pool shark. OK, he was a lot better than any of us, I suppose.

So there he is, playing this other dude I don’t know for a dollar. My friend loses, and the expression on his face was like he just swallowed a nine volt battery.

He takes out his wallet, and in a way that was perhaps intended to appear accidental - but I don’t think so - lets the bill slip from his hand and float to the floor, making no motion toward it.

I was disgusted at this display of bad sportsmanship and quickly moved to pick it up, but the stranger gestured to stop with his arm, “No. I’ll get it.”

He bent down to pick it up. Stood back up.

Looked at my friend.

“You’d better learn some manners, my friend, or you’re going to lose a fuck of a lot more than your money.” He walked away.

That stranger had gained my respect. And my friend had just lost it.


Jul 4, 2018

What is your theory about the JFK assassination?

I think the CIA killed Kennedy.

There’s just too many cock-eyed things that happened; Oswald being killed, missing evidence (including JFK’s brain - never found), incompetent autopsy, wildly divergent witness reports.

I think the approach they used was to make the crime impossible to investigate by providing hundreds of false leads.

Send in some Cubans. Send in some Mafia. Find some dirt on some cops and get them to flip on certain key facts like the make and model of the rifle found in the repository. Not all of them, just some.

Start bullying witnesses.

Have a guy fire a blank shot from the grassy knoll and run. Have more guys run out of the sewer. Yet more on the triple overpass.

Have a guy open an umbrella for no damn reason. Kill witnesses that may provide real proof; leave witnesses be so long as they contradict each other.

Start saying we have to suppress any possible Cuban connection - else a war could erupt, so it’s the first thing people think of. Of Oswald and the “Fair Play For Cuba Committee.”

The idea is to leave a situation where - it could be a lone nut. It could be another gunman on the grassy knoll. It could be a Secret Service misfire. It could be Cubans in the sewer grate.

Hell, the kill shot may have been a shaped charge in the limo behind Kennedy set off by the driver, who turns and breaks abruptly at the instant the kill shot lands at frame 313.

Everywhere, suspects scatter. Evidence is destroyed as quickly as possible. Anyone who can provide any definitive information is killed.

A hundred leads, no evidence, one simple story - no matter how unlikely. Every door you push opens, leading you away from the truth.

It’s almost beautiful.

For my money, I believe Howard Hunt’s recorded statement. That the CIA did it - specifically, Cord Meyer. Whose wife was having an affair with Kennedy. (She was killed while out jogging the next year. The crime was never solved.)


Jul 4, 2018

If tanks had honest slogans, what would they be?

“Stalin vill see unt shit his pants! Now get behind and help push …”


Jul 4, 2018

Would it be bad to marry an atheist? I am a Christian. I like my atheist friend. I am trying hard to stop liking him but I can't. He only gets nicer.

“I come not for the righteous.”


Jul 7, 2018

Excluding computer software or computer related software what are the best inventions in past 10 - 15 years?

Vaping! Behold the mighty ecig,

I vape. I vape all the time. I’m vaping right now. I vape in bed. I vape on planes (shhh.)

I used to smoke 1 1/2 packs of cigarettes per day. I haven’t touched a cigarette in a couple of years.

And I wasn’t trying to quit.

Every once in a while I reflect - between vapes - “Who knew they would ‘cure’ smoking in my lifetime ?”


Jul 7, 2018

A super talented new graduate developer always criticizes senior developers' code and makes fun of them. His programming skill is even better than the senior developers, but no one likes him due to his personality. As CTO, what should I do?

I’d lay my cards on the table.

“If you can learn to get along more graciously with others - especially those not as good as you - I want to promote you based on your skill.

If you can’t, I need to let you go.

Six months. Up or out. Tame your inner jackass, it’s holding up your career.”


Jul 7, 2018

Is opposition to affirmative action racist?

No,

A considerable faction on the Left opposes it (myself included.) Here are my main objections :

It diminishes the accomplishments of racial minorities. No matter what they achieve, some people will suspect they got there due to Affirmative Action.

It continues the toxic tradition of considering race before ability. It also bolsters the primary pillar of racism - if you’re not White, you’re just not as good.

It has no expiration date. Even if we agree with the idea that preferential hiring serves as a bandaid for history, when does the bandaid come off? I’ve never seen anyone address this.

It is blatant discrimination. While few tears are shed for White folk, there has been some real concern lately that Asians are being penalized for their race in admission to Harvard and some other top schools.

It’s like a pain-killer, which masks the symptom but not the disease. The disease is lack of opportunity and support from birth to 18 or so.

More on that last point; the real problem is poverty and all the things that come with it like crime, drugs, lack of two-parent households.

You want to help a super-bright black kid get into Harvard? Don’t make him go through hell for 18 years first, then try to fix the problem when he’s 18 by leaning on Harvard to let him in anyway.

He needs a safe neighborhood. He needs a two-parent house-hold. He needs a driver’s license, a part time job, a place to hang out with his friends. He needs a latop and Wifi at home. A cell phone. Good healthcare. A well-staffed school that prepares him for college.

And he needs to be able to make the sort of mistakes we all make without his world collapsing. To get into a fist-fight without getting shot. To get caught smoking weed without getting thrown in jail.

If you’re going to give someone a head start, then give it when it makes a difference - at the beginning of the race, not the end. Because the stuff I’m suggesting isn’t really a head-start at all, it just an even starting line.


Jul 10, 2018

What would the most important line of code be, in a text-to-singing website?

Apologies, but there is just so much wrong with this question I don’t know where to start …


Jul 12, 2018

Why am I unable to find a coder who is willing to be well-paid to code a text-to-singing website?

Because, thankfully, coders are pretty honest. The only person who would take you up on this offer would be ripping you off - taking your money in advance because they know the result won’t sound good.

Or else you might find someone naive enough to commit to it, only to spend hundreds of hours to reach dismal failure.

The rest of us - the vast majority - can spot an impossible project a mile away. Such projects are usually born out of an over-optimistic notion of what computers can actually do.

You may find this cartoon illustrative,

The next hurdle you are encountering is you. Coders are going to be initially put off that you don’t understand the limits of technology, but hey - that’s actually OK.

Once. And only once. What you do next is critical to them walking away from you.

Your options are as follows :

Imagine you’re a visionary, Steve Jobs style, and demand it can be done with sufficiently smart people and money.

Ask why. Believe what you hear.

Revise your vision within the scope of the technically possible. Because to realize your vision you must find a working compromise between idea and reality.

If you go with #1, you’re wasting your time. And coders are walking away so you don’t waste theirs.

#2 and #3 are your only possible means of finding developers. Money alone isn’t enough.

And even then, the revision called for in #3 usually fails, and you have to go back to the drawing board.

Tldr; Text to speech isn’t that good yet.


Jul 12, 2018

What would be a less "offensive" but still concise and accurate term for the phenomenon called white privilege (no arguments that the phenomenon doesn't exist)?

“White immunity” is more descriptive, I think.

Whites are immune to prejudice based on skin color.

While I object to the term “White Privilege” on grounds I’ve copiously expressed elsewhere, I have no problem with this one.

Note that “White immunity” isn’t something to be abolished; it’s something to be extended to all people. This distinction is a critical one.


Jul 12, 2018

What is the best way to fully remove a program in Linux installed from the source?

That kinda thing is really wonky. When you install from source, you are relying on that peculiar source’s uninstall function, if any. You’re really off-reservation at this point.

But sometimes, yea, you really wanna. The safest thing I’ve found is to snapshot your entire system prior to install, so you can quickly back the change out no matter what it was.

The Systemback utility, in my experience, is unrivaled for its reliability and simplicity :Systemback - Restore Ubuntu Desktop and Server to previous state

This is an especially good idea if you’re screwing around with drivers and such that can break your system. Systemback can maintain for you a second partition that provides not just a working copy of your sytem prior to the disaster, but also a rescue system to boot into.


Jul 13, 2018

Does IP refer to one computer or to each browser on that computer?

Just the computer and, more typically, the router/firewall that forms the Local Area Network (LAN) to which that computer belongs. (Usually a single household or business.)


Jul 14, 2018

What quotes will change the way a person sees the world after reading them?

I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure during your sleep. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be.
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. — Alan Watts.

Jul 16, 2018

Which is the programming language with most beautiful syntax?

Lisp.

Derived not from the grimy basement of a technician, but rather the sun-drenched Platonic playground of perfect forms; a direct descendant of Church’s Lambda Calculus.

It doesn’t just clarify programming, it clarifies your mind. Each new language you encounter seems like a mere dialect of Lisp. The LISPful recognize the ancient themes that re-emerge, almost perenially, masquerading as novelty.

XML - of course. JSON - naturally. Objects, parallel processing - just fall right out. Code and data are the same thing - of course code can modify itself.

Lisp isn’t really just another language. Conceptually, it’s the Big Bang of programming.

There is only one, deep in the past, and it lights up absolutely everything.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. — Paul Graham

Jul 16, 2018

What was in Anthony Bourdain’s toxicology report?

Mr. Bourdain met his tragic demise due to a closed, non-self-intersecting curve that is embedded in three dimensions and cannot be untangled to produce a simple loop.


Jul 17, 2018

Why would a Linux user use Powershell?

Linus Torvalds got drunk and hit on your girlfriend, and you are out for bitter revenge.


Jul 17, 2018

Why did my ex-girlfriend freak out when I told her that someday I'll be dating someone new even though she's the one who broke up with me?

Her motives were mixed. She didn’t “come to the breakup honestly”, to use a phrase that therapists like to invoke.

If she was totally, 100% over you and just wanted to move on - she would be happy (and even relieved) that you have moved on and are dating someone new. Because than any guilt she felt would be relieved, and she’d know you weren’t pining for her, and had gone on to build a happy life beyond her.

On the other hand, as is often the case, if she was trying to express anger to you, exact revenge, get you to beg for her back, or just make you miserable - then your moving on will be seen as an unforgivable insult which can never be erased (because now you’re gone.)

So, good for you for moving on.

PS : Don’t end up like your ex. Don’t break up with someone unless you come to that desire honestly.


Jul 18, 2018

What should you never say to a judge?

“No.”

I’m not a lawyer but I dated one for years, my mother and grandmother were also lawyers.

They all agreed that Judges have an awful lot of ego under those robes. Ego that a deft lawyer takes pains to placate.

When you must contradict a judge, you never say “No”, but rather “Yes, but …”


Jul 19, 2018

What is the most obscure joke/reference on a TV show that you got right away?

Years ago I was watching Cheers.

Coach, a character always fumbling his words, said “<something>, <something> cogito <something>”.

It was clear he meant ergo (latin: therefore). I had just taken a philosophy course and had read Descartes famous line,

“I think, therefore I am.”

Which in Latin is,

Cogito ergo sum.”

Coach had meant to say ergo but got it mixed up with another word in the Latin form of Descarte’s 1st axiom.

That was 1990-something, and I thought “This is the most obscure joke that I will ever get.”

28 years later that still holds up.


Jul 19, 2018

How can a software studio minimize build breaks in a large code base without slowing down developers?

Webkit and other big projects won’t land a patch until it runs a test-build on it.

The server has a script that performs a test-build as soon as a patch is marked for submission. It doesn’t land unless it passes.

Nothing is required of the dev’s local machine, and no harm is done if the test-build fails and is rejected.

(A series of additional tests are then invoked to ensure against a run-time regression.)


Jul 19, 2018

What is leadership?

I was working for this startup which grew to a mid-sized company.

A new CEO came on.

A week later, I was in a meeting of about 20 people. He walked in out of nowhere, looked around, “Hey - guys. Show of hands, who here doesn’t feel the need to be here?”

15 hands went up.

“OK, everyone with their hand up, please go back to work. From now on, any meeting with more than 5 people is opt-out, unless whoever called the meeting emails me personally explaining why it shouldn’t be.”

Productivity across the organization shot up 30%, and a few people were let go when it became evident all they did was schedule pointless meetings - now empty.


Jul 20, 2018

What defines a date?

Technically, it’s any shared activity where both people agree there is a potential for romance.

But Seinfeld gives a more practical, working definition.

If you ask somebody to take a walk with you, that’s not a date.

If you ask them to take a walk or something, that’s a date.

It’s all about the “or something.”


Jul 20, 2018

Are the words blockchain, cryptocurrency and bitcoin synonymous?

No,

Bitcoin is a type of Cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is a type of Blockchain.

In set notation, where \subset means ‘is a subset of’,

Bitcoin \subset Cryptocurrency \subset Blockchain.


Jul 21, 2018

What would you recommend to someone starting out purchasing bitcoin and is blockchain good to have?

Buy, hold and forget.

Don’t lose your private pass-phrase! That can’t be recovered if lost. Print them out and stash them somewhere. Two copies. And print out your wallet number - separately, two copies, and stash them far away from your pass-phrases.

Avoid Bitcoin per se, rather pick an alt coin which is “best in class” for some feature.

Monero : Privacy.

Ethereum : Beyond cash to smart contracts.

You get the idea.


Jul 22, 2018

My boss prefers to hire mediocre software developers because they are much cheaper and he thinks they have more room for improvement and will be more stable than rock star developers, is this a good approach?

Your boss is a perfect specimen of The Bozo Explosion : Preventing the bozo explosion

(A players hire A players, B players hire C players who hire D players until the whole company dies.)

Oh - and get out from under that boss, before you become a B yourself.


Jul 22, 2018

When programming, do people with a mathematical background tend to code differently?

Definitely.

But it’s subtle. It’s not about any one area like Deep Learning or Set Theory or anything like that.

It has to do with what math majors refer to as elegance. Elegance isn’t about getting a solution, it’s about finding the peak of simplicity and clarity that makes any other solution look silly, taking all sorts of pointless detours.

For example. in high school math class one day we were considering the problem : Given a set of size N, how many subsets of any size are possible?

The teacher began by considering all sets of size 1, then of size 2, and so on. He was building toward something called the Binomial Theorem - when a student raised her hand and interrupted -

“Every element is either in or out of the subset. That makes N independent, binary choices. So the answer is 2^n.”

The teacher smirked for a second, held out the chalk and said “Come up here. Write that on the board.”

She did. And the teacher said, “Today was supposed to be about the Binomial Theorem. But it turned out to be about …” and he wrote “ELEGANCE” under her solution.

Math students spend a great deal of time refining their sense of elegance. If we miss an opportunity for it in our work, it’s embarrassing. We look hard for it everywhere. We sign up for courses that offer it, we dodge those that don’t.

Elegant solutions often deliver more than originally hoped for. In this example, I have no idea what that student went on to do.

But if she went into software. her subset solution has useful features. Each subset is a binary number of N digits. This gives her an instant key - a numeric handle on each subset - which also tells you the elements once you unpack the binary digits.

I shouldn’t overstate my case, plenty of programmers have a sense of elegance as well. Math students just have a head-start and focus more directly on it.


Jul 22, 2018

How can a non-deterministic algorithm exist, how can one state lead to possible two different states?

You can get yourself a gizmo that makes use of quantum mechanics to give you a truly, for-real, no-foolies non-deterministic outcome :

QRBG121 / Random number generator / random bit / Non-deterministic random number / Hardware generator / Quantum Cryptography

If you don’t want the gizmo, there are some online services for it.

(It’s not actually really useful, except to prove to others you aren’t loading the dice, or to make sure nobody else cracks your psuedo-random algorithm.)


Jul 22, 2018

What are some first date tips?

If you’re a straight male, understand you are essentially color-blind when it comes to fashion. You could be wearing a bright orange shirt and pink pants; to you they look like graceful, matching shades of charcoal.

Only it’s not just color, it’s everything. Hair, shoes - everything.

If you’re straight and you’ve dressed yourself, you are not presentable. Don’t fight it.

Get a straight woman or gay man to help. Don’t argue with them, do what they say.


Jul 22, 2018

Have you experienced a stuck accelerator while driving?

Yes, the throttle cable somehow broke and got stuck wide open (never did figure out how.)

Luckily, I thought to put the engine into neutral.

On an automatic, this is done by pushing the PRNDRL lever up (do NOT push in the button on the side else you risk going into reverse. It snaps up to N - neutral, and you won’t speed up and can brake safely.

On a standard, just put the clutch in.


Jul 23, 2018

Did Hitler never think that to conquer Russia, he needs the biggest and the longest "blitzkrieg" with lots of "Pervertin" with the fact that Germans have limited resources and Russia has unlimited resources?

Hitler was emboldened by a few factors.

Given the insanely rapid victory over France (a month!), Poland, and basically all of Europe, he thought troop numbers didn’t matter; his soldiers were the best trained on earth and fanatically brave (true). His tactics were also the most advanced, coordinating everything from radios to airplanes to form the perfect fighting machine,

He understood that distance was a problem - it was over a thousand miles to Moscow. The Werrmacht would have to cross the Steppes very rapidly. This was actually fairly doable - they almost did it before winter came.

The Red Army had been decimated by Stalin’s Purge - Stalin had become paranoid about his experienced officers and god rid of most of them.

Hitler was paying attention during The Winter War when tiny Finland initially fought back a million heavily armed and armored Red Army troops.

Germany had just chased the British out of Europe with the evacuation of Dunkirk. Either through strategic error or diplomatic foresight (nobody can agree), Hitler entertained some hope that the British would lose their will to fight if Germany attacked Russia - which had also invaded Poland. Hitler never wanted war with England, and hoped his invasion of the Soviet Union would signal his sincerity about this and impress Britain with the notion that defeating the expansionist communists is in their long-term interests.

Napolean’s soldiers were mostly on foot. Hitler’s army rode on trucks. 1,000 miles didn’t seem a barrier any more.

Hitler didn’t anticipate a few critical things :

The autumn weather might not cooperate. There were torrential downpours in September which turned the thousand-mile journey into mud so deep that horses had to rescued from it. This amount of rain was very much a freak event.

The Russians had ramped up tank production. They had secretly designed the best tank on Earth (the T34), and were building them at an astonishing rate. Hitler lamented, “If I knew they had so many tanks, I would have thought twice about invading.”

The Soviets didn’t fight a pitched battle; they made use of distance and weather by staging a gradual retreat, destroying everything of use to the Nazis as they did. They realized they didn’t have to stop the Nazi’s, they needed only slow them down and deprive them of supplies until Winter set in.

A massive contingent of Red Army troops were held back in Siberia, training for war in Winter Time.

Despite Stalin’s purges, the Red Army was still devoted to Stalin (or at least their homeland.) Soldiers which had been over-run by the front but not captured reformed and counterattacked from behind enemy lines.


Jul 23, 2018

What is the best computer programming to learn?

Sublime seems to have pulled into the lead as the best cross-platform, all purpose code editor.

A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose


Jul 24, 2018

If programming languages had honest slogans, what would they be?

C : Because fuck you.

C++ : Fuck this.(- Dan Allen )

Visual Basic : 10 times as big but only 5 times as stupid.

Lisp : You’re all idiots.

JavaScript : You guys know I’m holding up the internet, right ?

Scala : That was a waste of 4 weeks.

Go : Tell me about it, Scala.

Python : All we are saying, is give un-typed a chance.

R : Whoa, I was supposed to be a statistics package!

Java : Like a Roomba, you guess it’s OK but none of your friends use it.

PHP : Do Not Resuscitate.

Perl : PHP, take me with you.

Swift : Nobody knows.

HTML : No.

CSS : I said no.

XML : Stop.


Jul 25, 2018

What incentives do miners get if Bitcoin is completely mined and most people begin to hodl (meaning less transactions)?

That is a legitimate problem.


Jul 25, 2018

Can I mine bitcoins on my office laptop and network?

Don’t mine - you are far more likely to brick your laptop through over-heating than to earn a single dollar.


Jul 25, 2018

What will you say if an interviewer says "You have 10 minutes to impress me"?

“You have 5. And you’re first.

So far all I know is you work at a place that’s hiring. That’s a start I guess.

Go!”

*Awkward 2 second pause.

“Or we could just have an open discussion. I’d prefer that. How about you?”

This is probably a very American answer.


Jul 25, 2018

What's something your employer did that instantly killed employee morale?

Didn’t have their eye on the ball when the office moved.

The company grew from 50 to 200 people and needed new space. The CEO was too busy and handed the whole thing over to his administrative assistant.

They said there would be more floor-space, but it didn’t work out that way. Meh - them’s the breaks.

There were lots of windows letting in sunshine. But - without consulting anybody but the architect, the assistant decided to wall off the windows, to create a common corridor where it was imagined people would stroll in sunlight.

They didn’t. All they accomplished was walling off the view and the sunlight from about 30 coders making an average of 100K a year.

The assistant - she approached her work-space very differently. Across the office, she was nestled in this sun-drenched nook, flanked by windows on all 3 sides of her.

This was the dot com boom. Jobs were everywhere. Nobody complained. They took one look around, concluded they weren’t appreciated, and a dozen devs resigned.

This simple, absent-minded mistake cost the company their top talent and at least 1.5 Million dollars in lost time, recruiting, training.

All because the CEO wasn’t walking around, talking to people, and didn’t realize his admin had misused the authority delegated to her.


Jul 26, 2018

Do you answer anonymous questions on Quora?

No, I don’t even see them in my feed.

I use a browser plugin that I made, ominax.com/qure. It’s free. The default is to highlight Anon questions in another color, but you can opt to block them altogether, which is my preferred setting.

The plugin does the same thing for off-site links. I don’t block these because they are sometimes interesting. But they display in a different color, so I’m aware that if I click I’ll be warped off-site.


Jul 27, 2018

I use the Qure add-on, which adds "-- asked by {name}" to every question and shades (or hides) anonymous questions. But some unshaded questions say "-- asked by ?" How are these different from anonymous questions?

I’m guilty of writing that plugin.

The difference is that the edit log for these questions goes past a single screen, requiring a scroll past the bottom. To access that, I’d need to create a full web-view (minibrowser), complete with JavaScript engine. I avoided that for efficiency’s sake - I am just doing an HTTP get and accepting the occasional failure.

Take heart though, I am very close to releasing a new plugin which solves that issue but also does much, much more. Called Qobalt.

Stay tuned.


Jul 27, 2018

What's the most widely held misconception about science that you know to be false?

This isn’t about science, rather it’s in science.

Razor-thin semantic distinctions aside, there is a mistake about Einstein’s Relativity that is made even by famous scientists and populizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

When we look at stars, we are not looking into the past.

Along with the speed limit for light, Relativity destroys the notion of absolute time. Put another way, of location-independent time.

When we look at Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, we aren’t seeing it as it was 4 years ago. We are seeing it as it is now, for an observer whose eyes and whose wristwatch are here on Earth.

Time is bolted to location.


Jul 28, 2018

How can I filter out logic topics on Quora with the words “fallacy” or “god” in them?

I’m the coder of the Qure and Quark plugins (ominax.com); I’m about to release a 3rd plugin called Qobalt which, among many other things, enables you to filter certain keywords out of your feed.


Jul 29, 2018

How do I download Python, but not the one with the stupid command prompt like GUI?

I … wouldn’t go ’round saying command-line stuff is stupid - not ’round these parts. Them’s fightin’ words.

But if you want an elegant and helpful graphical IDE for Python, look no further than PyCharm : Free, powerful, built (sort of) from the ground up for Python.

PyCharm: Python IDE for Professional Developers by JetBrains


Jul 29, 2018

Why didn’t the Founding Fathers allow for a state to leave the union?

While the language in the Declaration of Independence declares that government arises from the consent of the governed, and that the governed retain the right “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them”, The Constitution makes no provision for secession for very good reason.

Such a government would be paralyzed for its brief lifetime. States that felt strongly about some legislation, but lacked the votes to get their way, would threaten to secede.

The government would be forced to cave in, or else call their bluff. Some states would likely go ahead and secede, offering to rejoin only if they got their way.

It would become a stalemated cluster-fuck of secession.

Nothing would get passed and the whole thing would fall apart almost instantly.


Aug 1, 2018

My girlfriend says fake words all the time, like 'fantabulous." Should I break up with her because of this?

Notsolutely.


Aug 1, 2018

Where can blockchain be used, except cryptocurrencies?

The broader case is Smart Contracts - see Ethereum and their Virtual Machine.

Everything is either an implementation of Ethereum’s smart contracts, or complete bullshit : 99% of Blockchain Startups Are Bullshit


Aug 2, 2018

What is the biggest no-no when you are a software engineer?

The Port to Nowhere.

There is a good time to port software to another platform. When a demand for that software exists on that platform. That’s it. There are no other good times to port.

And then there is the Port To Nowhere. This is the creation of Empty Suits. There are exactly two scenarios :

Another language is currently trendy. The empty suits think that by porting FORTRAN to Java they’ll magically get a manageable, faster, multi-threaded, plug-and-play, better documented system. What they will get is a buggier version of their old system, in very badly written Java.

Acquisition. You just got bought out! They’re in PHP and you’re in VB.NET. The Empty Suits will order a port so that everyone is, yanno, on the same page. But there is no page. Or book for that matter. The merger of these dissimilar technologies should never have happened in the first place. Either the unholy union dies, or the new appendage (you) dies. The port is rarely completed.

You can’t stop the Empty Suits from doing this. It is the nature of Empty Suits not to learn from the mistakes of their ancestors.

As a coder, you should leave immediately.

I’m serious.


Aug 2, 2018

What line of code changed the world of artifical intelligence?

“What line of code” [some amazing thing] has been a recurring theme on Quora lately.

No single line of code does much of anything.

Nor a single page it, nor 10 pages.

It’s not like physics, where decades of complex abstractions culminate in some resonant coda like e = m c ^2.

Or literature, where eternal history is made by wondering aloud “whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Code doesn’t reduce like that. There isn’t an important or even interesting single line of code anywhere. At all.

Ever.


Aug 3, 2018

Has Alex Jones dangerously broken the bounds of the First Amendment to the point where he should be taken off the air and punished? Why or why not?

The only bounds to the First Amendment are where speech becomes an action : threats, incitement to clear and imminent violence, sounding a false alarm, and so on.

The Framers of the Constitution advanced a form of governance never before attempted in human history - based on a single proposition : The common man is capable to govern. He can sort out right from wrong and truth from lies.

The moment you try to lock up Alex Jones on the grounds that the common man is too idiotic to laugh at Alex, or too sensitive to endure Alex’s ramblings, you might as well take down the American flag and declare the experiment of democracy a failure.

A lot of young men with bright futures wound up face down in the mud of Normandy to uphold democracy.

You can close a Youtube tab.


Aug 4, 2018

What is the biggest no-no when buying bitcoin?

Don’t lose your pass-phrase.

Nobody can recover it. Nobody.


Aug 6, 2018

Does vaping have any effect on your body?

Sure, vaping is known to cause slight dehydration since the key components of vapor - propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin - are hydrophilic. That is, they suck moisture out of anything they touch.

Vaping has also been observed to cause some slight and temporary tissue irritation to the mouth and throat.

And of course, nicotine is addictive and has a whole bucket of effects on the central nervous system.

Relative to smoking, it’s not in the same league at all, so it’s great for harm reduction for those who just can’t quit.

But if you’ve never smoked and have no addiction to nicotine, these effects are non-negligible and worth considering. (To say nothing of the long term effects, about which we know nothing at all.)


Aug 7, 2018

Why do people keep asking questions about the fictional “white privilege” myth? It simply does not exist! It’s a replacement for the bankrupt ‘race card’.

I agree, but you’re being trixxy by using Quora as a soapbox, stating opinion as a rhetorical question.


Aug 8, 2018

What does good code and bad code look like?

Good code has a (simple) structure but does not repeat.

Like architecture.

Ugly - no structure.

Ugly - structure but repetition :

Beautiful - structure, simplicity, minimal repetition.


Aug 8, 2018

How can a college woman build confidence to ask men out instead of waiting for a man to ask her out?

What Claire J. Vannette says, plus here’s a hack.

Go get rejected.

Pick a guy who is like some uber-dude, apparently out of your league, it may even be somebody who you secretly found out is already monogamous with somebody else. Or gay. Whatever.

The point is to walk up with the intention of getting turned down, practicing your come-back line (something like, “can’t blame a girl for trying *bright smile*.”)

Do this a couple times. Something transformative happens.

It’s not that bad. It’s not bad at all.

The other person may have been a little awkward, but they didn’t expect it. Sure, maybe you were anxious. And it took a while to work up the nerve.

But when you actually did, it was nothing at all ! They were flattered. And sure you got turned down - but you feel …

Alive.

You’re in the game.

Buy yourself a drink and congratulate yourself. You’ve crossed a line many people never cross, the line behind which people remain eternally single.


Aug 9, 2018

Why, in the United States which has never been a tyranny, is there such a fear of government tyranny that many feel a need to arm against one? What is the evidence to support that or, if it's an emotional fear, what drives it?

Decades ago, there was a commercial on TV for a anti-dandruff shampoo called Head and Shoulders.

One woman confesses her dandruff problem to a friend. The friend says, “Oh. Try Head and Shoulders! I use it once a week.”

The woman protests, “But you don’t have dandruff.”

The friend gives a sly smile and says, “Exactly.”

Our government has been kept free, in part, by a citizenry that stubbornly asserts their rights and quickly challenges any incursion upon them.

You can’t shut us up, tell us how to think, or disarm us.

You govern only by our permission.


Aug 10, 2018

What are some economic hacks that most people do not know?

Americans are buying iPhones for the whole planet.

700 Million iPhones (!) have been sold.

Americans buy them new at around $800. But we pay 2x to 3x that, because we lock into a multi-year payment plan.

Then we upgrade after 2 years.

The rest of the world knows a couple of things, though:

You can buy a SIM card with an excellent data package for $20–30 / month.

A 5–6 year old iPhone works great. You can buy one in perfect condition for $100. Because Americans are dumping them into the used after-market (and they are exceptionally well built.)

$100 down, and 20 bucks a month. Today (Aug 10, 2018), that means an iPhone 5S. No contract.

I have one. It works great. Movies, Waze, Quora, Facebook - it’s not slow at all - clips along nicely. It just lacks a few of the latest features, like touch ID. The features that Americans demand, but which really don’t improve the user experience in any meaningful way.

The iPhone is subsidized by the American desire for novelty .

Edit : 2 years later (June 2020), still using that same iPhone 5S, still happy with it. Shame on Quora though, for deprecating their old Quora app.


Aug 10, 2018

Can I change the Python version being used with virtualenv without creating a new virtual environment?

I do, on Ubuntu systems anyway, the standard python installation allows me to type,

python foo.py

For python 2.x, and

python3 foo.py

I use both all the time, for reasons I’m too embarassed to divulge.

When installing python3 modules, just do it like this -

pip3 install newmodule

Both versions happily coexist, each with its own modules.


Aug 11, 2018

Why has Watergate become the benchmark for U.S. scandals, at its time was it really the worst scandal in U.S. History?

It was a very serious scandal as the President was abusing his executive powers for political advantage and just breaking the law like crazy.

He was

Obstructing justice by compelling underlings to commit perjury, lying himself, and firing the Attorney General for investigating him.

Illegally diverting campaign funds to pay hush money to people.

Using the IRS and other branches of gov’t to harass and intimidate people.

Destroying evidence that had been subpoenaed (erasing 18 minutes of tape.)

And the list just goes on and on. He became paranoid and basically went mental.

However, as for the worst scandal in American history, my vote is for a little-known event that was swept under the carpet at the time. It’s called The Business Plot and it occurred in 1933.

America was in the throes of the Great Depression and FDR was taking on big business. Breaking up monopolies, regulating banks and all the other platforms of the New Deal were considered an existential threat by the very wealthy American super-class.

A group of powerful financiers and businessmen attempted to enlist one of America’s most senior military officers, Smedly Butler, to command an army of several hundred thousand soldiers to overthrow the US government and establish what we would now call a Fascist Dicatorship.

Butler played along for a while to gather as much information as he could, then publically blew the whistle on the whole thing.

FDR decided to let the whole thing go, perhaps because he didn’t consider their plan was a legitimate threat - but certainly because the economy was so fragile that he didn’t want to go after key economic players.

The press at the time dismissed Butler’s accusations as fantastic and poked fun at him.

However, recent historians have revised this view and many consider this plot to have been dead-serious and certain to erupt were it not for Butler’s loyalty.

When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR

And the worst scandal I put last, because many reasonable people will disagree with me on this, but for my money :

In 1963 there was a coup d’etat executed by LBJ and the CIA to assassinate John F Kennedy.


Aug 11, 2018

As a software developer, what has been the most frustrating bug you've tracked down and fixed?

Several times, it’s been writing to an uninitialized memory pointer in C/C++.

It’s frustrating for a couple of reasons,

The behavior is completely random after that point. The program could run fine. It could crash instantly. It could blow up 5 hours later in some other part of the code. Recompile in debug mode and - guess what! - the compiler usually initializes all pointers to NULL in debug mode, so now the error is gone! It truly is “bug foot.”

It’s so easily avoided. Just set pointers to NULL when you declare them, and when you delete/free them. I can’t tell you how many apparently competent programmers have been shocked to discover that - yes - if you don’t initialize them, they just point to random places.

Irreproducible. Camouflages as other bugs. Debugger defiant.

Truly diabolical.

As if it was deliberately weaponized in hell.


Aug 12, 2018

I found a security problem on a website. How do I turn this knowledge into money legally?

Call the boss. NOT their IT dept or web support, but find the CEO or CTO of the company and call them directly. (Their IT dept will want to bury the error - and you - as quickly as possible.)

Make sure they understand you will under no circumstance use the exploit against them, nor divulge it to anyone else. Give them for your full contact info and offer to let them verify your ID. This is not extortion, you are offering your technical services in exchange for whatever renumeration the market will bear.

Then show your hand :

A security flaw exists - lay out the potential cost/damage that could (reasonably) result.

You will tell them the security flaw today for $X.

Or they can conduct their own internal review to try and find it - in a week the info will be available from you for $Y ( < X ).

If they find and patch it themselves, offer to confirm for free if it’s the same one you discovered.

After one hundred and eighty days they can have it free it any case.

Add the proviso that you get paid only if they implement the patch (which presumably you can check.) This will be their insurance against a false alarm.


Aug 14, 2018

How do I know if the spark plug in my Buddy 50cc scooter is bad?

Pulling the plug out is a good part of routine maintenance, because even if the plug is working OK, it’s a great diagnostic tool for your engine.

If your engine is running rough (stalling, sputtering, hard to start …) swapping in a new spark plug should be your first diagnostic step.

Here’s a video courtesy of Urban Madness Workshop, showing you how to locate and pull out your spark plug.

Now eyeball it and compare it to this chart,

It it doesn’t look Good, you should replace it. (If your engine is running rough, you should replace it no matter how it looks, to see if things improve.) Some people clean them, but they’re only 5 bucks so most pop a new one in.

Note also that the way the plug looks tells you something else about your engine. The center picture indicates the engine may be running too “rich” (too much gas, too little air.) This could mean a clogged air filter, a bad “fuel/air” mix setting on your carb, among other things.

The right picture is running too “lean” - not enough gas with too much air. This makes the engine run too hot. That’s a more serious condition with potential for cascading damage. (Try to err on the side of a little too ‘rich’ at all times.) This could be a fuel line problem, a clogged carburetor, among other causes.

When replacing the spark plug, be careful to use a proper socket wrench, do not over-tighten or cross-thread the plug. Be gentle. Use your bare fingers at first so you can feel it threading properly.

By the way, some people get a nice performance boost by using a higher performance iridium spark plug (they last longer too.) They only cost $10–15 so it’s an easy thing to try.


Aug 14, 2018

Why does my vape pen taste burnt?

Your coil is zorched. Toss out the remaining juice in the tank and replace the coil.

And let it soak for 15 minutes before hitting it. Otherwise you can zorch the new coil as well and get the same burnt result.


Aug 15, 2018

How do I get my mom to buy a computer for programming at age 11? I really want to know how to program. What should I tell her?

This other kid started to learn to program at 11.

By age 12, he managed to write a program that his father actually used in his office - so he could get messages from the front desk.

Today he’s worth 63 Billion. Zuckerberg.


Aug 16, 2018

In Django, after adding new lines to my CSS, upon hitting refresh, my app loads the old code without the newer lines, why?

As Isaac Jessop says, it’s due to browser caching.

Here’s a neat little trick to avoid that problem, it’s especially useful when sending a link to a client to review. Add a url parameter that means nothing, like this

http://www.mycoolsite.com/?cache_me_outside=11243

And use a new value for 11243 each time. The new parameter tells your browser - and the server - that the cached version of the page might differ, so it forces a full page-load no matter how many layers of caching may be at work.

For your own development, there are lots of handy browser plugins you can use to purge the cache.


Aug 17, 2018

Can I connect an internal IDE hard drive while my computer is running?

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.

You don’t spit into the wind.

You don’t pull the mask off the ole’ Long Ranger,

and you don’t hot-swap a hard-drive in.

doo do-do-dah dEEE da doo-doo-doo .


Aug 17, 2018

Is the fact that the Manafort jury asked the judge for clarification on "reasonable doubt" a good sign for the defense?

I don’t think so.

If you’ve ever watched Twelve Angry Men, you can make a fair guess as to what’s going on without any deep legal background.

The question is only pivotal when you’re close to a unanimous guilty verdict and the majority is trying to sway the last 1 or 2 jurors. A debate ensues, where the hold-outs are trying to assert the existence of a ‘reasonable doubt’, at which point the definition becomes a critical cross-road.

While of course this isn’t definitive and invokes some guesswork, on balance the odds seem to favor the prosecution.


Aug 17, 2018

Where do I start with NLP in Python?

I would start by installing the NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) Natural Language Toolkit, start working the examples, find a good tutorial and get online and get active in a forum.


Aug 17, 2018

Would you share some of your own creative work with us?

I once found a marble in Gloucester, MA :


Aug 17, 2018

How do I turn my python app with Tkinter into a macOS .app file?

Here’s a nice drag-and-drop GUI builder for Python/Tkinter that works on a Mac.

Good for putting together a basic UI in a hurry, called simply Page :

A Python GUI Generator


Aug 17, 2018

What do you think of "The Next Populist Revolution will be Latino"?

I don’t think the country can survive too many more populist uprisings.


Aug 18, 2018

Should Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debate Ben Shapiro for $10,000?

I object in the most strenuous terms to those answer writers, however well-intended they may be, who derive their response from Ocasio-Cortez’s gender or ethnicity (and by implication, Shapiro’s.)

It disregards and disrespects the humanity in all of us to reduce this to a contest between a male Jew and a female Hispanic.

Seriously, shame on you. (And her too, for likening his challenge to ‘cat-calling’.)

Should she debate him? Shapiro is popular among young Republicans and generally held in high regard by the Right. He’s a fast-talking, fast-thinking, moderate conservative (with a pronounced Libertarian streak). He’s also an extremely skilled and experienced debater. So, no - you don’t step into the ring with a prize-fighter.

She doesn’t owe Shapiro a debate. As a respected (if brash) commentator from the Right, she might owe him a polite demurral.

But if she’s serious about social change, she’s going to have to debate somebody who is going to publicly attack her ideas. Debates aren’t about being nice. Each side is trying to destroy their adversary’s agenda. That’s politics.

Gender and race aren’t a valid shield against this attack.

Politics is a fight, and you fight your enemies, not your friends. But you do fight fair. You fight their ideas.

Not their race or gender.

(It’s really been about 30 years since this bore pointing out. That’s … not progress.)


Aug 18, 2018

Are there parallels between Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and today's USA?

There is no parallel between Atlas Shrugged and any society that has ever existed in the history of human insanity.


Aug 19, 2018

I just learned that there is no "use strict" in Python (as in Perl). What is Python's protection against typos then?

Protection against type mismatches has been introduced in Python 3.6 . 3.6 introduces “type hints” so that an IDE like PyCharm can catch type errors prior to code execution.

How to Use Static Type Checking in Python 3.6 – Adam Geitgey – Medium

It’s a little hackey, but it works. The lack of static typing wasn’t an oversight, dynamic typing is also used in Lisp and other languages. While it introduces new problems, it does eliminate some old ones; the trade-off is deliberate.

Personally, I haven’t found a need for it.


Aug 19, 2018

If I purchase a new laptop today, how long would I have to wait before the laptop has proper drivers on Ubuntu?

You should be fine right off-the-bat. In fact, you’d probably have better luck installing Ubuntu than you would Windows on a blank drive and new laptop.

If you have any trouble, DM me and I will see to it personally that you are up and running. Ubuntu culture is like that :)


Aug 19, 2018

Is Neil deGrasse Tyson overrated?

His shows don’t do him justice. As a popularizer of science, he’s as good as anybody, I guess. It’s hard to be great at that; it’s all a polished, scripted, very packaged media product.

But you have got to see him lecture. Off-script, improvising as he goes - he is nothing short of amazing. He’s poetic, compelling, dazzlingly lucid.

Netflix has some of them as part of The Great Courses series, here’s a free sample on youtube :

No special effects, no glitz, no script. Just Tyson in blue-jeans explaining physics. He never looks to a teleprompter; just glances occasionally at the floor to gather his thoughts.

Far from being over-rated; I think Tyson’s gift as a lecturer is obscured by a media industry that doesn’t know enough to just let him talk.


Aug 20, 2018

I adjusted my idle screw on the scooter, now there is no spark or sound, it is just dead, how do I solve this problem?

It sounds like you disconnected a wire while you were in there. Give all your wires a tug and a jiggle with your ignition on, and watch your headlight for a flash.

I think you’ll find a wire is either loose or disconnected completely.


Aug 20, 2018

How do I learn to code Machine Learning Algorithms (I have the basic knowledge of Python)?

I think Keras (Keras Documentation) is a great place to start.


Aug 20, 2018

I'm 5’8 1/2", is it bad if I don’t want to date girls above 5’5", because I’ll feel a bit insecure?

I’m about an inch taller, and I was in LTR’s into my later 30’s, and only then had my first experience at regular dating (match.com) .

A couple of women asked me if I minded that they wear heels when we meet up, as they were close to my height. I was surprised to know that was A Thing, I had never thought about height at all. But apparently, some guys are sensitive about it, and women know that, and are understanding.

So I think you’re off the hook.


Aug 23, 2018

What would you do if your manager is saying that he will say negative things in your relieving letter when you leave the company?

Tell him to sign it clearly enough for a judge to read.


Aug 23, 2018

The highest office in the United States is the Presidency. This office has always been shown respect, regardless of who was holding it. So, why are so many disrespectful and despise Trump, even though he holds this office?

It is in the life-blood of our great republic that we give the President almost unimaginable power, but then we give them hell :

1963:

1967 :

1974 :

1998 :

Anyone who runs for that office has fair warning - Keep it squeaky clean or get clobbered.

Power corrupts. Corruption gets your ass handed to you.

It seems ugly and - yea, it usually is. But it’s been working for decades. The Presidency doesn’t exist for the benefit of the current President.

The Presidency belongs to the people.


Aug 24, 2018

What should I do if a friend who has quit smoking for a year or so now occasionally asks me for a cigarette? I denied but now I am worried that he will feel like buying his own and he will completely relapse.

It’s not really your fault, either way. Whether or not you give him a cigarette, the fact that he is asking for one and prepared to smoke it means he’s already crossed the line into slipping and will almost certainly relapse this time.

Addiction almost never returns to moderate or occasional use.

Your friend will almost certainly relapse in this quit attempt, but take heart : Going through the attempt-relapse cycle is just part of the process of getting free from addiction.

Let them do what they’re going to do (relapse), but encourage them to tee up the next quit attempt soon rather than “eventually”.

It’s not a failure, it’s just an incomplete success.

(Also : vaping may serve as a good harm-reduction measure; suggest if they are relapsing, relapse to that rather than smoking …)


Aug 25, 2018

What do you do as an "answerer" on Quora when you get a truly nonsensical reply to your answer?

I’ll share with you a Huge Thing.

It took me years to discover it for myself. Back in the days of Usenet - a sort of pre-web online discussion forum.

The Huge Thing has probably saved me a man-year of time. An untold amount of aggravation.

Here it is. Here comes the Huge Thing.

The vast majority of comments do not warrant a reply.

Nobody is reading the comments anyway. If the comment is wrong, another commenter is likely to argue with them. Or others know the Huge Thing and just let it sit there, an singular turd of wrongness people just step over.

The instinct to defend yourself against a boneheaded commenter is natural, but it is a pure waste. The few people who read the comments will readily see the person is a bonehead. Is it the bonehead himself you’re worried about?

Why are you allowing a bonehead to place a claim on your time?

That’s it. That’s the Huge Thing.

It generalizes, of course, to Facebook, Twitter, and really to life itself.


Aug 25, 2018

When I was small I didn't like learning mathematics, but as I grew up I became obsessed with learning calculus and other advanced math topics, is something wrong here?

Same.

I flunked long division in 4th grade, and went on to major in math and was pretty good at it.

Math taught to kids is arithmetic. Arithmetic is drudgery.

Only when we hit geometry and algebra do concepts begin to sprout from the gravel of grinding away at computation.


Aug 26, 2018

What do most people misunderstand about Einstein's Theory of Relativity?

Almost everyone makes this mistake. Even famous scientists do.

Starlight is not from the past. This notion is an artifact from pre-relativity days when time was thought to be uniform. That all clocks everywhere are in synch.

Relativity does away with the notion of absolute time (See Relativity of simultaneity - Wikipedia.) Put simply, time and location are bolted together. “Here and now” is fine. “There and now” has no meaning.

When we see star light from Alpha Centauri, most of us say it left Alpha Centauri “4 years ago” - according to our watch.

Not so! Our watch doesn’t mean anything on Alpha Centauri. The key realization, that everyone knows but keeps forgetting, is that when we move the watch we change it. We move through time-space, both time and space.

This also gives a fresh perspective on the “speed of light limit”. It’s more subtle than an upper bound on simple speed.

I can take the watch off my wrist, and send it to Alpha Centauri in 3 seconds. That is, my watch will only have gained 3 seconds on arrival. It would take immense energy but there is no theoretical problem with that.

Photons do it in zero seconds. The photons we’re seeing from Alpha Centauri haven’t aged a nanosecond.

But here’s the thing : Alpha Centauri isn’t just a long way off, it’s 4 years in the future. Its distance from Earth crosses both time and space. Technically, its distance is the magnitude of a 4-dimensional time-space vector.

If we gas up a super rocket with unlimited energy, and fly off to Alpha Centauri, we can be there in 3 seconds. But the clocks on Alpha Centauri have gained 4 years in transit (technically, this statement isn’t meaningful - we can’t talk about clocks on Alpha Centauri till we get there. But cut me some slack on that for now.)

This should not be confused with seeing “old light”.

We can fire up the same rocket and return to Earth in another 3 seconds. Now we’re eight years ahead, Earth time. (Our wristwatch only advanced 6 seconds.) So we travelled 8 years into the future.

Earth is 4 years in Alpha Centauri’s future. Alpha Centauri is four years in our future.

Distant objects are also future objects.

Every point of view sees a different timeline of the universe. Causality never gets messed up - you never see a star die before it’s born, but simultaneity and other artifacts of uniform time go out the window.

So, when we look at a distant star 50 light years away, we shouldn’t wonder if that star has since exploded and we just don’t know about it yet.

We are seeing the star exactly as it is, from our point of view, right now. To speculate about how the star is “now”, from the star’s point of view - we have to speak in terms of some measurement we could make. An experiment.

So we could fire up a super rocket and get there in 3 seconds, sure. But “there” is a another place and time. The star may indeed have exploded upon our arrival.

That’s not because light is delayed. It’s because we moved forward in time in order to get there.

It may seem like semantic nitpicking, but I don’t think so. If we ditch the “stars in the past” idea, and instead fully embrace the notion that all motion is also time-travel, we gain a richer understanding of Relativity.

Edit : (The comments contain a lot of spirited debate. Among them is a post by Mathew Routley which gives, I believe, a clearer and better explanation than the one I was able to give in this post. Worth a read - https://www.quora.com/What-do-most-people-misunderstand-about-Einsteins-Theory-of-Relativity/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/71725019 )


Aug 26, 2018

What’s the biggest compliment you can give a software developer?

Using their software daily.


Aug 26, 2018

Why do people say JavaScript is hard when I found it awfully easy to learn as a first coding language?

JavaScript is only hard in the sense that building bookshelves out of marbles is hard.

It takes a lot of extra effort and patience and introduces new possibilities for failure - all for no other reason that you started out in the worst possible way.


Aug 30, 2018

How long should I walk my corgi everyday?

Corgis are athletic herding dogs, despite their short legs (legend has it, breeders nurtured that feature so that sheep couldn’t kick the corgi.)

They are born to run. In circles around the herd.

If you have a yard, a 20 minute game of fetch will give them a chance to work those 4 little pistons.

A dog park is ideal, where the pup can socialize with other dogs and run around with them. (This also gives you a chance to be lazy and let the other dogs do the work for you.)

This type of vigorous exercise is ideally done daily.

Some people can’t manage this - they should probably think twice about adopting a corgi. However, at minimum, one or two 20 minute walks per day should be OK, as long as they also get a chance twice per week at vigorous exercise.


Aug 30, 2018

Why do vapes/JUULs make you poop more?

Nicotine’s a stimulant - stimulants tend to do that.

Same thing for caffeine, cocaine, etc.


Sep 2, 2018

Why do people say writing a browser is harder than writing an OS?

An OS can be truly modularized.

The file system knows nothing about the keyboard or network. These areas are almost entirely walled off from each other.

The effect of this is profound over time. Developers need only understand the piece they’re working on. Updates to that piece won’t break other components, so testing can also proceed independently.

But a browser is hopelessly tangled. Style sheets can break font-handling. Image generation can break color management. JavaScript can break everything.

I once broke American Airlines trying to patch date-rendering in JavaScript. I wish I were joking.

Newbies must tread very lightly, and enlist the help of massive regression-test suites.

An OS has a stable set of requirements.

An OS usually goes through small, incremental enhancements. Touch support is about the most disruptive thing to happen in recent years. Aside from that, it’s mostly business-as-usual.

The Browser is required to do massively new things all the time.

As web standards evolve, we keep throwing entirely unfair new requirements at the browser. Were it not a critical piece of software, many of these changes would result in a rewrite from the ground up.

Style sheets, HTML5, multi-threading and multi-processing, GPU optimization, resource constraints 100x tighter due to mobile … these are mass extinction events for code and take an unbelievable effort by hundreds of developers to hack, cajole, and cheat their way into keeping up.

Switching OS’ is hard, so if one OS falls behind competitors, it has time to catch up.

Switching browsers takes 5 minutes. The barbarians are always at the gates, waiting for you to stumble so they can sack your city and steal your users.


Sep 5, 2018

How was Ronald Goldman a black belt?

A couple of considerations come to mind.

Ron Goldman was just 26 years old. Depending on the school, some black-belts are much easier to get than others.

A ‘real’ black-belt requires a bare minimum of 6 years with very intensive training and re-testing; more reasonably 12–15 years.

Goldman just wasn’t old enough to put that kind of time in.

Knife-defense is a very particular skill that completely changes the defender’s priority. All focus is on the knife. In a less rigorous school, this is an area which can easily be under-developed and under-practiced.

Part of it is just recognizing that the attacker has a knife at all. Can you see both hands? Can you see the palm of both hands? Is one hand being held back - their dominant hand? Did they just reach behind them?

That’s a lot of stuff to figure out when you’re surprised and scared shit-less; it takes enormous training to respond automatically without thinking.

Goldman also was at a terrible disadvantage because of the lighting. He was pushed to the side into an area which was pitch black (he was also trapped by fencing.) You can’t fend off what you can’t see.

Finally, as a completely insane hypothetical, suppose the attacker had been selected for strength, speed and reflexes from a population of 300 million so he could play a brutally physical sport. That in this sport he was the among the best there ever was.

Even with vigorous training, very few people would survive a caged-in, pitch-black knife attack from that guy.


Sep 5, 2018

Assuming the 9/5/18 NY Times anonymous Op-Ed piece was actually written by a current White House senior official, are you more optimistic or pessimistic about our nation? In particular, there were early cabinet whispers about a 25th amendment action!

I’m more optimistic. I was just a kid during the Nixon crisis, but the childhood experience of it was so vivid that I felt drawn to learn more about the breakdown in Nixon’s final days in power.

Nixon had made bitter enemies. He made enemies of the press, within his own party, the Department of Justice, and his own administration.

Looking back, one gets the sense that a consensus was reached. Nothing official, just bar-room talk, with Democrats, Republicans, reporters, wealthy power-brokers, even FBI. That everyone agreed that come what may - this guy has to go.

As the legal proceedings plodded along, there was a steady drum-beat in the news attacking the President. The voters were presented with the case against Nixon - the man himself.

It was relentless. It came from across the aisle, from his own staff (and lawyer.) It dominated the news, obscuring any agenda the president may have hoped to advance. It went on for months.

When the time came for a Senate vote, the electorate back home supported the impeachment by 75%. Nixon resigned in advance of his inevitable removal from office.

What’s happening now to Trump feels very much like the same thing. I can’t shake the suspicion that at McCain’s funeral - there was some bar-talk afterward. The most powerful political figures, past and present, were assembled in DC.

And I think they went out for a drink afterward. That promises were made, persuasions offered, and a consensus reached :

One way or another, this guy has to go.

I bet glasses tinked and people said, “To John.”

The apparent chaos we see now are the hounds of political war that were let slip that night.

I think that we are going to see story after story breaking weekly or bi-weekly, systematically weakening Trump until they move in for the kill. He won’t finish out his term.

It’s ugly, sure. But the system is working.


Sep 8, 2018

Will having a fake boyfriend to make my crush jealous backfire?

For the most part, men don’t react to jealousy by trying harder. They veer off. This is a critical difference between the sexes; women tend to rise to the competitive challenge while men tend to reject it.

This creates a dismal situation where a woman might be at a party with a guy she likes; in order to get his attention maybe she makes out with some random other guy in the corner for 5 minutes. To her baffled dismay her crush shuts down completely as if somebody kicked out the plug. Days, weeks, and months later - he doesn’t approach her, makes polite small-talk only when cornered, doesn’t return texts, etc. He’s veered off. He’s gone.

It makes some sense, I guess, from an evolutionary perspective. This behavioral trait would prevent young, healthy males from constantly trying to kill each other.

Of course it’s not all men - I think it’s more common in the younger ones. (After all, it’s doesn’t really make much sense.) It’s instinctual and takes time to unlearn.

But it’s a lot of men. And it’s often irreversible. He can’t rekindle his feelings toward you even if he tries. It’s irrational as hell but human behavior often is.

If you like a guy, getting a fake boyfriend is quite possibly your most direct path to losing him forever.

(You’ll notice that only your female friends will ever suggest this. Ask a male friend and he’ll say, “Whoah. No no no …”)


Sep 12, 2018

Is there a way to download one's Quora footprint? Answers, posts, and comments all of them together.

Yea, I wrote a browser plugin (Firefox) to download your entire body of Answers into a single ‘book’. Sorry - no support for Comments or Posts at this time.

It’s especially useful for doing key-phrase searches on your collection of answers. Over 800 quorans have used it to date.

Quark browser plugin


Sep 13, 2018

What’s the deal with some girls shaving the sides of their head? Why would they want to look like that?

The ‘undercut’ has got a long history, dating back to the mass production of razor blades and the generational head-shavings of both world wars.

It began with men, and was especially popular with the, erm … Nazis :

Well hey, they also invented rockets and highways so whatever.

And I have to admit, they looked pretty good -

In the late 00’s the style started coming back for women, and seems to have been gaining ground ever since.

I think it looks awesome, playing the masculine rubble against the feminine tresses, aggressively androgynous, sexy as hell :

Like long hair did for men in the sixties, it also carries an air of rebellion against gender norms. “My gender isn’t supposed to do that? That’s what I’ll do, then.”


Sep 15, 2018

Is it const because of constant or const because of consistent?

Constant.


Sep 15, 2018

How do I deal with a neighbor who parks their car in my driveway? I told them not to, yet, I still come home to it when they think that I'm out.

Put up a few planks of wood and partially spray-paint them.

Then place a sign by the drive-way.

“WARNING : Painting in progress. Not responsible for damage to vehicles illegally parked on this property.”


Sep 17, 2018

What does the future of Linux look like now that Linus Torvalds is going "on a break"?

Oh - this is a great development for Linux and for Linus himself.

Linus has made a firm choice to evolve personally, to grow up.

His abrasive (abusive?) treatment of the hundreds of devs working on Linux (often unpaid) is legendary. The outer world regards this with detached amusement as the antics of an enfant terrible who changed the world with a free OS that now dominates servers and mobile.

But inside the Linux community, people have been hurt. People who work for free. Companies who may have been cooperative had Linus been more diplomatic. Devs have been lost and partnerships missed.

The triggering event seems to have been Linus’ insistence that a dev conference be moved from Canada to Scotland, so he could more easily attend. So they moved it.

Then he announced he doesn’t want to go anyway. That was the last straw to a bunch of devs, and many spoke of quitting Linux.

Linus had some kind of awakening and announced he’s taking a break, and getting some sort of professional help in becoming more empathic and considerate of other ppl’s feelings.

It takes a lot of integrity and courage to announce that publically. I think he’s sincere. He’s getting older now, has children of his own, and is gaining a sense of the greater arc of his life.

He’s chosen to create a better legacy for his four children, three human and one silicon.


Sep 18, 2018

Is it possible to use an AMD GPU for machine learning or other computationally intense apps on a Mac? With Python? What setup? Any advice?

Sure can, I’ve done this (on Ubuntu, but it’s very similar.)

It goes like this :

If you haven’t gotten an AMD card yet, lots of used ones are being sold (mainly to crypto miners) on ebay. Last I checked, the best bang for your buck is the 6970.

OSX provides OpenCL out-of-the-box, you’ll want to verify it’s working properly with your card using the command line function clinfo or similar sanity check. Here’s Apple’s compatibility list for matching desktops/gpu-cards - Mac computers that use OpenCL and OpenGL graphics

The next step is to select a Python library. Several libraries exist that parallelize vector computations : TensorFlow, PyTorch, ArrayFire.

This will turn your Mac into a supercomputer. As time goes on, you can achieve another order of magnitude (or two) of performance by writing your own OpenCL ‘kernels’ in C, and linking them to your Python program.

I do this sort of work for hire, btw, I’m always happy to offer advice or help troubleshoot for free, so HMU with any follow up questions.


Sep 20, 2018

What are some tips and tricks when using Python to read and write to an SQLITE database?

It’s all about the adodbapi module :

adodbapi


Sep 21, 2018

My parents have a broken laptop that doesn't have broken components. However the laptop won't start. What can I do with it?

This is rather a stab in the dark, but try pulling the battery out, and seeing if it boots up while plugged in.

Often a completely dead battery will soak up so much charge that your laptop can’t boot up.


Sep 23, 2018

What habit did you pick up in the military that you still keep and civilians don't understand?

When I hear a bugle, I stop.

I was just a military contractor for the Navy during the cold war; I was never in the armed services.

One day, shortly after starting there, I was walking around 5 PM with my boss. Some bugle began to sound and I asked,

“What’s that?”

She just put her arm in front of me to block my path and said, “STOP. Don’t move and don’t speak until it’s finished.” Her direct glare intoned that she wasn’t joking.

After it finished, she continued and I followed her lead. She explained, “They play that when they lower the flag. It dishonors our war dead to ignore it. It also really pisses off the MPs [Military Police].”

About a year later, I was walking with my best friend whom we had just hired. The bugle played, and I put out my arm to block his path. “STOP …”


Sep 23, 2018

Why is JavaScript considered "pretentious" among senior programmers?

Pretentious?

JavaScript is considered many things, but pretentious isn’t one of them.

Lisp is pretentious. In its clumsy way, so is COBOL.

JavaScript is messy. It’s a language that began as a way to add some decoration to a web page, then hastily had to mutate into a full-blown object oriented colossus. On both client and server.

It’s so utterly brain damaged that the library JQuery isn’t an optional library at all; its de rigeur since it helps protect the developer from JavaScript’s internal struggle to make any sense at all.


Sep 25, 2018

What are some tips for someone getting into vaping?

Those disposable cigarette-sized things are a total waste. They don’t work well and are insanely expensive. Vaping only costs 50 cents per day. Get yourself a refillable rig and some liquid instead.

There are two essential types of vape : Standard nicotine and nicotine salt. The salt kind delivers a much stronger nicotine kick, so it might help you switch off cigarettes faster. (The JUUL invented this, but you can now buy it everywhere.) On the other hand, it may be too strong of a nicotine hit for you.

If you go with the salt solution, don’t use a ‘sub ohm’ coil. Use a coil with resistance greater than 1.2. I recommend the Breeze Aspire (1, avoid the II model).

Buy your first few bottles of’juice’ in stores and online to experiment with flavor. They cost about $20 per 30 ml bottle. But once you get a sense of what flavors you like, you can buy unflavored nicotine and flavoring at lots of online shops like MyFreedomSmokes Electronic Cigarettes | E-Liquids (unmatched selection, quality and speed in my 3 years of experience.) For $25 bucks you can make 250ml in various flavors, a savings of 10x.

Recognize when your coil is blown. If vape suddenly stops, or it taste like burnt metal, or is just gurgling like crazy you need to replace it.

Don’t keep the thing in your pocket with coins and keys. Once in a blue moon that causes a short and the thing asplodes, like any lithium ion battery. Also, if you feel it getting hot from charging or heavy use let it cool off before resuming use. (Again, same for any LiOn battery.)


Sep 25, 2018

Is Ray Bradbury's 'Farenheit 451' at least as relevant now as when it was first published?

I like Jonathan Schaper’s answer, but just for fun I’m going to take a dissenting view :

Fahrenheit 451 hasn’t aged well. The novel is about the steady dumbing down of society. Electronic media becomes the great opiate of the stupified masses. An authoritarian government is making use of that, keeping the populace blissfully free of dissent;,offering up meaningless ‘elections’ where the candidates differ only in appearance.

The world of Fahrenheit is one where knowledge is state-controlled, centralized, and distributed in a paranoid trickle.

A few things Bradbury got right. Our TV screens did become big, flat and ubiquitous. Some of them are interactive in the sense of Fahrenheits immersive TV shows.

But Bradbury didn’t foresee the next stage of evolution in media : packet-switched networking. That is, the internet.

You see, Fahrenheit’s world is doomed. Sprinkled throughout the book are hints that, despite their big TV’s, technology is going backwards. A straight edge razor is presented as “the latest thing.” This illiterate, dazed and drugged society is slipping backwards - one wonders how much longer their power stations will keep the TVs on.

But our world did not stagnate, it leaped ahead into the internet age. While in 1990 media was delivered to you by a handful of corporate and governmental bodies, the internet blew the information market wide open.

Sure, we have a screen on the wall but we also carry a tiny screen in our hand. And it’s a portable TV broadcast station. Governments can’t control the story of events on the ground as millions of citizen reporters broadcast video of live events.

In this sense, our world is the reverse of Fahrenheit. In our world, you have access to information from Noam Chomsky to Alex Jones. Even totalitarian regimes struggle to control citizen’s access to absolutely everything.

After all, I’m not anyone of any particular note. I don’t work for any news agency or government. But I wrote this post about Fahrenheit 451 for the simple reason that I thought I had something to say.

And now you’ve read it.

I find that amazing. And just the antithesis of Fahrenheit 451.


Sep 25, 2018

When you hear someone say, "We should strive for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome", what goes through your mind?

“Ah. The dying song of my people. I must offer them water and shelter for the night. Once we marched beside the great Dr. King, now we are outcast.

Today, some are more equal than others.”


Sep 27, 2018

Does Apple knows that Linux operating system exists, or pretending to be unaware? Microsoft acknowledged Linux and open source only recently.

Apple is painfully, lividly aware of Linux.

Linux is at the heart of Android. To his dying day, Steve Jobs railed that Android stole Apple’s ideas and then decimated the iPhone’s market share with inferior but cheaper smartphones.

None of this invective was directed at Linux itself, which never asked to be put on a smartphone.

But still. Apple knows about Linux in spades.


Sep 27, 2018

What is the most important (and perhaps the only) question you should ask if you are being stopped or held by law enforcement?

“Am I free to go?” and “Am I under arrest?”.


Sep 27, 2018

Why do so many people not realise they are wrong in dismissing "innocent until proven guilty,” solely because they dislike Kavanaugh?

A Supreme Court confirmation is not a criminal trial. A Supreme Court justice never faces election, cannot be removed, and has the ultimate constitutional kill-switch at their disposal.

Nobody has a right to be on the Supreme Court. We grant this staggering power to only a handful of people every generation.

So we raise the bar sky-high. Our vetting process does not aim to be fair to the nominee. At all. The future of our republic is the only consideration at stake. A nominee should expect scrutiny which is withering, unfair, and ruthless.

The president should have two dozen backups ready, and nobody should expect any given nominee survives this process, or is granted anything resembling the benefit of a doubt.


Oct 4, 2018

What lasting effects did learning LISP have on you?

The first thing I did was write another programming language.

I was working for Defense during the Cold War, doing wargame simulations. They needed to encode instructions for a “weapons platform”, say - a submarine. Stuff like “lurk in deep water trying not to get detected and head slowly for Iceland. Unless you spot a Soviet sub, in which case follow them. But above all else - if you hear a torpedo, launch counter-measures (noise-makers) and run like hell while flooding your torpedo bays.”

Lisp is the simplest (hence clearest) incantation of a programming language. You can fit the whole language definition on a post-it note. Implementing it is a project which takes days, not months.

Any other programming language can be seen as a needlessly complicated version of Lisp.

So I wrote a language specifically designed for a military tactician, to describe wargame tactics in terms closest to the way they think. It had all the usual features of other languages; mathematical expressions, variables, function calls, loops, branches, all that stuff.

It wasn’t just a change in syntax, the program flow was different to reflect the way military tacticians think. They think in terms of a time-step event-loop, with multiple concurrent threads of execution that interrupt at the end of the of time-step, but resume at the same place in the code at the next time-step.

It just took a few months. All I was doing was translating this complex stuff into very simple Lisp.

They thought I was a frikkin’ god. I wasn’t. Lisp had blown my mind open to the essential simplicity of programming.


Oct 7, 2018

How do I parse a string into a double if the string is "Math.sin(4) + 4" so that the double is equal to Math.sin(4) + 4?

JavaScript enables you to execute code stored in a string like this -

x = eval(“Math.sin(4) + 4”);


Oct 9, 2018

Are students penalized for expressing different opinions than their professors?

Sure, it happens to faculty as well.

Certain right-leaning media outlets like The College Fix exist for the sole purpose of reporting nationally on the suppression of dissent -

https://www.thecollegefix.com/


Oct 9, 2018

How do I do floating point division in python?

Just ensure that one or both of the operands are floats, like :

1.0/x

or

float(x)/y


Oct 9, 2018

How do I do modular arithmetic in python?

As in many languages, the percent sign is used because it’s evocative of division :

> 105 % 5

5


Oct 10, 2018

I’ve heard that it’s possible the Little Boy dropped Hiroshima was actually a German built bomb stolen by the Allies. Could this be true?

No, if Germany had The Bomb they certainly would have used it. Germany’s nuclear progress came to a virtual halt in 1942, as resources were redirected into their rocket program.

American scientists later commented how shocked they were at how little progress the Germans had made, “We (The Manhattan Project) got farther than that in the first 6 months!”

There is a grain of truth here, though. The Americans did come upon a huge store of Uranium on their way to Berlin. The metal was shipped back to the States and fed to the refineries to complete Little Boy.


Oct 10, 2018

Is the latest UN report on climate change, by 91 authors and citing over 6,000 scientific references, finally going to convince the sceptics?

Science is not a social enterprise. We don’t count the voices. We subject them all to experiment and analysis and watch to see which one survives this assault. The survivor becomes (for now) accepted theory.

Far from solidifying a position, a huge chorus of voices is a sign of weakness, not strength. It signals an attempt to persuade before the grim reaper of scientific validation has done its work.

I’m reminded of a book published in 1931 by Albert von Brunn, Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein).

Einstein’s response might inform the 91 authors of the UN report, “A single correct one will do.”


Oct 10, 2018

The hurricane that's getting ready to hit the panhandle of Florida, is said to be the worst in US history. Will conservatives change their minds about global warming and join the rest of the world to combat this problem? What drives their denial?

Here’s the thing :

If wrong, the theory of man-made global warming could lead directly to the collapse of civilization.

We usually think that it is the safer bargain to accept that hydrocarbon emissions are warming the climate.

It’s not. What worries the skeptics is that global warming is happening naturally, independent of CO2, and entirely beyond our control to stop.

If that is true - by chasing CO2 we are solving the wrong problem. We need instead to be moving populations inland from oceans, bracing for major disruptions in food production (perhaps reducing global populations). We also need to prepare for the opposite extreme - the Ice Ages which engulf the planet like clockwork.

In the middle ages, the Black Death appeared and lay waste to civilization. Nobody disputed the urgency of the problem. But mankind has always had a certain … exaggerated sense of his importance. We are often seduced by the archetype that a cruel reality is brought on by our own misdeeds. That tragedy is the wages of sin.

So we spent centuries repenting, praying, sometimes flagellating ourselves to lift the curse of the plague.

We were blind to the radical suggestion that our first guess was wrong.

So it’s 2018 and the atmosphere is warming. Sure, it could be our CO2 emissions. So let’s transition off them.

But it might not be our CO2 emissions. It’s equally important we listen to that view.

For all our claim of enlightenment, as a society we react to fear in much the same way as the Middle Ages. We harass those who embrace doubt; we brand a heretic the eccentric physician who redirects our gaze from our own flawed magnificence toward some damned idiotic notion about the rats.


Oct 11, 2018

Is there another app like Xcode where I can code desktop apps visually, but in Python?

I’m a fan of a Python GUI-builder with the unfortunate (for search engines) name of Page.

Page provides a “What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)” drag-and-drop GUI builder for Python. It uses the cross-platform GUI library TKinter.

Welcome to the PAGE Documentation


Oct 11, 2018

With the world coming quickly to a close because of climate change, we need to start thinking outside the box. What are some crazy, unethical, unorthodox, expensive, futuristic, improbable ideas on how to save the planet?

Nuclear.

Fukushima and Chernobyl reactors were designed in the 1960’s.

They share the feature that they rely on properly moving parts - active cooling systems - to shut down safely.

New reactor designs, already in late testing stages, like the Thorium-Salt reactor are designed to shut down passively. That is, if you cut all the power, jam every valve and burst every pipe - the thing just cools down and shuts off.

China is using technology abandoned by the U.S. to build the nuclear plant of the future

Every industrialized nation should collaborate on perfecting, producing and deploying this technology.


Oct 11, 2018

Who did Hitler trust the most in his inner circle?

That distinction probably goes to Josef Goebbels,

Unlike most of Hitler’s inner circle (Speer, Goring), Goebbels was really a huge nobody before Hitler elevated him to Minister of Propaganda. He had no war record nor any sort of career - not even a steady job - to his name. More than perhaps anyone, he owed his whole identity and sense of purpose to Hitler.

Paradoxically, Goebbels began in the early Nazi party as something of a Hitler critic (during Hitler’s prison stay). During the latter part of the war, Goebbels was even known to make off-hand critical remarks of Hitler, “It takes a bomb under his ass to take matters seriously” (after a failed assassination attempt with a bomb at The Wolf’s Lair.)

But Hitler tolerated these transgressions as the mere barking of his most faithful dog. Goebbel’s fanatical allegiance to Hitler reached its ultimate expression in Goebbel’s suicide in Hitler’s bunker along with his wife and - most tragically - his six children.


Oct 11, 2018

Why was the Linux Mint operating system created?

Mint’s original creator, Clement Lefebvre, is a man of very few words. His stated purpose was to add ‘elegance’ to the Linux Desktop.

I think he meant this in a Steve Jobsian sort of way. The Ubuntu distribution always had the mandate to bring Linux to the masses. To make this hacker’s tool user-friendly, accessible and flexible for all. A Desktop for your grandmother and for a Lisp programmer.

So this involved some compromises. The Windowing software (Gnome/Unity,etc) had to please all audiences and provide endless options.
Hardware had to be provided for from a netbook to a server farm. And so on. Ubuntu grew to be very powerful and very flexible in all possible worlds.

Mint took a different approach. Mint sought to be the most pleasant, most delightful and most forgiving way to use a computer for a smaller set of users. A person who might do some programming, maybe not, has only one or two machines in their house. They’re not setting up a web server, though they might like to experiment with one.

They want to install Mint and get an instant Wow! The Desktop is gorgeous! All my apps are right here! Launch a browser, switch workspaces - man, this thing is fast!

And of course, the wifi works. The soundcard works. Flash works. If the OS had to use some proprietary driver to do that, fine - fuck it, Open Source is great but don’t drag my desktop into that fight.

Look - the whole OS is hardly using up any RAM!

Mint targets the entry-level user. If you’ve got some very advanced work to do - like high-end video editing or something, Mint isn’t made for you.

For a person new to Linux, or for a fairly typical home user, Mint has one goal in mind : To blow you away with its beauty, simplicity, its …’elegance’.

(This post was written on a Linux Mint/Mate machine. The hardware is 10 years old but my machine is probably much faster than the one you’re reading this on.)


Oct 11, 2018

Is Linux really free?

Yes, it is “Free as in beer” (no money) and “Free as in freedom” (you can view its source, modify it, and do mostly whatever you want with it.)


Oct 11, 2018

Which is better to manipulate databases, SQL or Python? I am working to expand my skills and abilities in utilizing databases and ERPs. I have no (none, zero zilch) experience in programming or code, but I can do a quick study.

I hate to shoot up the middle, but a little of both I find to be ideal.

First off, you need to know enough SQL to do a query, and an update. “Gimme some stuff, and here - take this stuff.”

Beyond that you can get away without being proficient in SQL. By using Python’s adodbapi module, you can map database records to python objects and you should be good to go.

Theoretically, a module like adodbapi should completely abstract away the underlying database structure so that you could be oblivious to SQL entirely; in practice that’s not realistic.

Learning pure SQL might seem the most tempting approach, but given that you’ve got no coding experience, SQL would be a much more miserable introduction to the topic than Python would. So I’d urge Python with a minimal sprinkling of SQL.


Oct 13, 2018

Is it possible to call a method of another class without using inheritance in Python? If so, how?

Composition is the other (more commonly appropriate) means of interacting with a different class (delegation).

That is, your object contains another object of a different class. The owned object is a member of the main object. See Python 3 OOP Part 3 - Delegation: composition and inheritance .

Composition is usually the conceptually ‘right’ answer and should be your first instinct when it comes to delegation. Inheritance should only be used sparingly, when you’re convinced that your class truly is-a subclass of a superclass. The overuse of inheritance created a lot of hopelessly gnarly systems in the early days of OOP.

Within the Python world, which references Monty Python’s Flying Circus at every opportunity, the cool way to say ‘composition” is “Putting things on top of other things.”


Oct 13, 2018

Why didn't Nikola Tesla receive the credits that he deserved for his astonishing works? Why is he so underrated as a scientist?

Others have pointed out Tesla wasn’t a scientist - though I think they are being a little rough on Tesla by saying he was “only an engineer.”

I think Tesla may be called the Father of the Electric Age. The most impactful inventor of the 20th century (by a mile, nobody else comes close.)

In recent years, history has been revised to grant Tesla this due credit. There were two essential factors which combined to obscure Tesla’s greatness :

Edison and Tesla hated each other, and Edison was much better at PR. Edison understood relationships and propaganda. One of his greatest inventions was the myth of Edison himself, pulling the world forward by grit and American gumption. The grimy truth is a dull tale. (He didn’t invent the light-bulb. He refined earlier attempts, productized and popularized it.)

Tesla was bat-shit crazy. And attracted a bat-shit crazy fan-base. From talking to Martians to lighting up all of Earth’s atmosphere, he often sounded like L Ron Hubbard dropped acid.

None of this, however, detracts from the amazing and totally non-obvious ideas he developed and got into real-world production. He alone realized that the natural way to transmit energy is by vibration like light and sound, rather than pressure as in a water pipe. He was the first to really put Maxwell’s Field Equations to work.

He and Marconi were neck-and-neck in the race to develop radio. While Marconi initially got the credit and patents for a working radio telegraph, shortly after Tesla’s death in 1943, the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s claim to priority in his patent 645,576. (The court was doing this for unrelated selfish interests given we were now at war with Italy; however it’s not clear why the patent was awarded to Marconi at the turn of the century in the first place. Marconi used some of Tesla’s prior art and filed a few years after Tesla did.)

Most important of all was his invention of polyphase current. If you could carry only a single sheet of paper into 1900 to kick off the 20th century, this would be it :

With this, Niagara Falls can turn a wheel in New York City. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of that.

To be clear : like Edison, Tesla wasn’t the first ever to tinker with his best ideas. But he got them across the finish line. The tale is messier than “Eureka!”, but doesn’t ultimately detract from the unique stamp this person left on the world.

Side note - the attorneys at the bottom - one of them is ‘Curtis’. That’s Leonard E. Curtis, my great-great grandfather !! He was Tesla’s friend. How cool is that?


Oct 13, 2018

Why does Quora treat an anonymous poster as if they are not as important as someone who uses a name?

Anonymous questions are, on average, of much lower quality. From thinly veiled political statements to trolls to outright nonsense, Anon Questions has a near monopoly on junk.

So much so that I made a browser plugin to distinguish them in a different color (or filter them out.) Below, notice how this question appears green in my feed …

http://ominax.com/qure

(All that other stuff on the right is new plugin called Qobalt which adds statistics and stuff. http://ominax.com/qobalt )

</shameless plug>


Oct 13, 2018

Do you think people are born with the ability to do math?

Yea.

I’m pretty good in math. False modesty aside, in terms of creative ability, drop me into any medium sized town in America and I’m probably the best in math in that town.

Meaning not that I know the most about any given specialty like topology and such, but rather if you give me a difficult problem that is accessible to your average college student - I am the most likely to find the best solution in that town, even in competition with their local college faculty.

So, yay me. Just don’t make that town Cambridge, MA. And don’t make it a suburb of a major city like Chicago.

I majored in the subject out of sheer laziness. I could wing an undergraduate program by coasting on natural ability.

But I didn’t go on to work in the field of math (despite the urging of my professors). For a simple reason : I wasn’t good enough.

When I was 20, I came into contact with a few people whose talent is a qualitative level above mine. Some were younger. They had this common trait :

In the time it takes to them to blink twice, they could solve a problem that would take me a week of trial, error and reflection to solve.

Just - bang! - they’d see it instantly. It’s as if I was a great cyclist but they had the innate ability to fly.

One of them was a freshman at Caltech. There was nothing in his upbringing that instilled this magic bang. His father had it too.

This kid was just born with it. There was no point in my stewing over my limitations. I’d never be that good. But - like the gift of flight - for us groundlings: it is a wonder to behold.

“Of native talent I often say - If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home. Stay home.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

Oct 15, 2018

How do I find the comment I just made to someone's answer to a Quora question? Why is it so difficult to find?

I made a new plugin called Qobalt which provides this feature. (Viewing recent comments was Alexandra Pell ‘s idea so I tossed it in.)

In the right-hand part of your home feed, it shows “Trending Answers” (those getting upvotes recently), your most recent answers, and your latest comments. Like this (see the lower right.)

Click image for readable, expanded view :

As a bonus, it also includes all the functionality of the Qure plugin, so you can see who asked a question, highlight or filter anonymous questions and external links.

The motivation for this plugin is it gives you a helicopter view of your own recent activity, that you may bask in your own awesomenity. For the hyper-graphic literary narcissist.

I have been lazy about posting a splash page for this new plugin on Iridiumblue's liquid-cooled plugin factory., I’ll do that tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, here’s the links for the add-on :

Chrome - Qobalt

Firefox - Qobalt – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US)

Edge - Geez, give it up already.


Oct 15, 2018

How can I make libertarians understand that the government exists to protect them?

That’s exactly what they’re afraid of.

Freedom is not a life made safe, rather - it is a life unencumbered by interference from your neighbor or government, however noble or nefarious their intent.


Oct 15, 2018

If you were the last human on an earth colonized by aliens, what would you try to communicate to the aliens?

We built a dead man switch. When the last human dies, all our atomic weapons spontaneously detonate.


Oct 15, 2018

What should you never do or say in Massachusetts?

“Go Yankees!”, “This chowder sucks!” and most of all : “Where’s the JFK Museum? We come all the way from Dallas.”


Oct 15, 2018

What is the best C++ IDE for machine learning?

For machine learning, you’re probably going to need the computing power of a GPU acting as a Massively Parallel Processor.

And for that, you’ll want CUDA - NVidia’s C++ API. NVidia provides an awesome IDE especially tailored for that called NSight :

Nsight Eclipse Edition

Now, this is useful only if you are using your C expertise to hand-roll your own CUDA ‘kernels’ to get maximum power out of your GPU.

This isn’t an advisable way to start out with Machine Learning; you’ll usually begin with some off-the-shelf framework/library like TensorFlow. Here you won’t concern yourself with the whirling blades of the GPU, so any C++ IDE at all will work just fine.

It’s really only after you have your model working and see a) it takes too much time and b) your GPU “occupancy” is low that it becomes worth your effort to start messing around with Nsight and CUDA.


Oct 16, 2018

What's the most interesting thing you've learned from your time as a software engineer that is not computer-related?

People who can’t code have a deep distrust of those who can, and vice-versa. About 90% of what passes as “business process” is really the obstructive result of this mutual suspicion.


Oct 16, 2018

Can I sue Quora for not helping me gain access to an old Quora account that I have no access to that can be publicly viewed and has a picture of me?

Hahahahahahahahahahaha - no.

On Quora or any other web service, if you’ve lost your password and recovery email address, Quora is physically unable to recover your password. It’s been ‘hashed’ and even they have no idea what your p/w is, and can’t find out.

Of course, they do have the power to reset your password and let you in, but that creates a security risk for them as hackers will attempt to ‘social engineer’ (bullshit their support ppl) to break in. So no web service will do that in any circumstance either.

Even if in some alternate reality it were feasible to grant you access without compromising security, they are under no obligation whatever to do so.

You posted stuff. You lost your password. And your email.

You’re out of luck.


Oct 17, 2018

How do you pass by value and pass by reference in Python?

Technically, Python uses “pass by assignment.” This is like call-by-value, in that you can do this :

>def plus_1(x) :

> x=x+1

>

>x=5

>plus_1(x)

>print x

5

Here, x was passed by value - local changes within the function didn’t echo back to the calling scope.

However, if we use a list, elements are passed by reference. So that here,

>def plus_1(x) :

> x[0]=x[0]+1

>

>x=[5]

>plus_1(x)

>print x[0]

6

So we can think of it as a “shallow copy”. A change to any list element will be reflected back, but if we change the “top level” - blast away the list itself, that change won’t be seen outside the function. So while x[0]=99 gets passed back, x = [55,66] won’t.

This works for any mutable data type like a dictionary or an object you defined in a class.

More on this topic here - Programming FAQ - Python 3.7.1rc2 documentation

Note : Functional programming monks will state you should never change variables that were passed in, rather, you should compose a completely new list/dict and return that.


Oct 17, 2018

Where can I download all my Quora data, or at least my answers?

You’ll want to use my world-famous, much-acclaimed and totally awesome browser extension called Quark. Unlike the fumbling attempts of lesser mortals, it Just Works for everyone, all the time, in excelsis Deo.

And it’s free even. Though tipping me via the donate button is by no means a crime.

http://www.ominax.com/quark

(It only works for Firefox, but since you only need to run it once to download all your stuff, you can just temporarily install Firefox for the sake of the download. And hey - the new Firefox is fast and awesome and worth a spin if you’re into that sorta thing.)


Oct 17, 2018

Why does if aa == ["Yes","yes"]: not work in Python? How can I set a defined variable equal to a list of things?

That does work, so that

>aa = [“Yes”,”yes”]

>print (aa==[“Yes”,”yes”])

True

What I think you mean to ask is - at least it makes some sense in this case - is how to check if a variable is a member of a list so that,

>affirmative_response = ["Yes","yes"]

>aa = "yes"

>if aa in affirmative_response :

> print ("Yup!")

Yup!


Oct 17, 2018

Who assassinated President John F. Kennedy?

Not Oswald. The kill-shot came from in front of the car. The strongest evidence for this has been hiding in plain sight, all this time, going mostly unnoticed and unmentioned in the Zapruder film.

Here’s the slowed down, stabilized Zapruder film (warning : graphic violence.)

I’m sure you’ve seen this before. Only this time, don’t watch Kennedy. Watch all four people in front of him : Governor Connelly, his wife, the driver and the guy riding shot-gun. Use your peripheral vision to see the instant the killshot hits Kennedy, but focus on these other four at 0:18 (time is greatly slowed here.)

At 0:18 the kill-shot hits Kennedy’s head. Everyone in front of Kennedy is thrown forward by the blast. In less than 2/10 of a second real-time, all four hit the dash or barrier in front of them. But Jackie doesn’t move at all.

Now that you know what to look for, it might be easier to see in real time, at 0:12 -

You might think the driver was startled and slammed the brakes (contrary to his training - which is to hit the gas in case of attack), but human reaction time to being audibly startled is 0.17 sec, so he would not even have the brake pedal down by 0.20, when the guys in front are already hitting the dashboard. And Jackie would have been thrown forward as well.

So if it’s not the brakes, what was it? An explosive bullet. It’s an old gangster trick. You drill out some of the lead at the tip of the bullet, and fill it with something like mercury fulminate - an explosive sometimes used as a primer. But any similar explosive will do.

The advantage to gangsters is that it increases the kill power and most critically destroys the bullet, so it can’t be traced to your rifle. And, um, can’t be proven not to be from another rifle.

The four people in front of Kennedy are hit by a shock wave from the exploding shell. Kennedy’s head shields Jackie from the blast so she alone doesn’t move. Kennedy’s head is thrown backward.

This is explained - and really, only explained by an explosive shell striking Kennedy in the right-front of his head (and more to the side than to the front). Which means an assassin somewhere in the direction of the “grassy knoll”.

Here’s a Myth Busters clip about the explosive power of mercury fulminate. This shows 5 grams detonated, a bullet could probably hold 2, so about 1/2 the bang shown here. So half of the explosion demonstrated in the clip appears about the right magnitude to cause the effect in the Zapruder film.

Finally, and I have no idea if this guy is telling the truth, but a mafia hitman by the name of James Files has publically stated that he was the shooter on the grassy knoll, using a “Fireball” with “mercury bullets”. He claims he was a backup shooter, and had orders to fire only if Kennedy appeared alive and only if he could do so without risking hitting Jackie.

(‘Fireball’ refers to the cartridge made for the Remington XP-100 pistol Remington XP-100 - Wikipedia, released in early 1963, that offered the accuracy of a rifle but at only a foot long could be easily concealed.)

I don’t know if Files is telling the truth, is a very good liar, or some carefully planted bit of misdirection.

But I am confident that whoever fired that fatal shot was not Oswald, was at ground level to the right and front of the motorcade.


Oct 18, 2018

If you could tell all college students one thing, what would it be?

Big corporations want you to be good but replaceable.

They want you to be interchangeable with other people working in the same category. Your individuality won’t be of interest to them, in fact - if you stand out from the herd that actually counts against you.

That’s why, for software developers for example, big companies want to see your grade point average, and the ‘interview’ is really an in-person exam. The same exam is given to everyone.

Standard metrics applied uniformly. If you try to break from the herd - even to show off your talent - they won’t welcome it.

If they give you some question about algorithms, and rather than a direct answer you consider a higher level of abstraction to suggest a more interesting question - something like that - they won’t be impressed. You’ve gone off-script and now can’t be compared to others via an Excel macro. A slight scowl is the best you’ll elicit.

If you want to go to a big company, don’t “be you”.

If you want to “be you”, don’t go to a big company.


Oct 18, 2018

What are some good free, open source Linux utilities to make C programming more productive, efficient and safe?

lint is like a super-picky compiler, finding code that - although possibly legal - is likely to do something unintended or is just bad style. lint (software) - Wikipedia. Lint is so popular that “linting” is a popular term for other languages as well which have similar tools.

valgrind provides a suite of tools, that help you hunt down memory leaks and speed up code. Valgrind Home

perf focuses on speed and is more lightweight than valgrind, which can slow your program way down during its analysis. Perf is a quick way to get performance data, so you start in the right direction before drilling deeper.

sublime is just a Damned Good Code Editor, which provides auto-completion, block collapsing, and all manner of wonderous things to C++ and any other language you can think of. While IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like Eclipse are great, many programmers don’t actually use them day-to-day. Writing code and debugging code remain very separate tasks, despite the valiant efforts of IDE designers to bring them into harmony.

gdb is the default command line debugger. You should have a working knowledge of this because it is always available on a Un*x system. You can attach to an already-running process, and use it on some remote server to which you only have remote shell access.

Did I say IDEs were bad? Oops. If you end up optimizing code using an NVidia GPU as a Massively Parallel Processor, NSight will save your sanity.

cppcheck focuses on the worst error of all - the great beast that is to be feared - reading or writing to unallocated memory. This produces unintended behavior which may occur long after the offending line, surfacing in some other part of the code, in a different way every time. A true nightmare to debug. Some of the most famous viruses and worms spread via ‘buffer overflow’, one type of this class of bugs.

Avoid using naked arrays, if feasible. Use a library (can be your own or one you pilfered) that enforces bounds checks at every reference. And a string is an array.

Think twice about freeing memory. Does memory really matter? Or are you never really going to use more than 10MB, and is it speed that is of critical importance? If so - **** it, don’t free anything, let the process leak and die off when its done. Freeing memory slows the whole thing down, not just when you call free, but at every subsequent malloc. (The heap can get fragmented, causing a lot of extra work when looking for an open block.) Webkit - the engine behind Safari and Chrome, didn’t give priority to leaks for the longest time because it was speed that mattered at first. (I imagine that’s changed now, but it’s been years since I’ve worked on it.)

No need memorizing gcc’s man page, but commit these 3 options to memory : -g turns on debug symbols. -O3 optimizes for speed above all else (no debug symbols. For speed test and production code of speed-critical apps.) -Wall shows all warnings.

This last one is a good one : make will run at least 10x faster just by adding the -j option. That instructs make to unleash all your CPUS by running as many jobs in parallel as it can.


Oct 18, 2018

Is there anything similar to Valgrind but works with Windows? For checking if a program has any memory leaks.

Visual Studio provides an option, AfxEnableMemoryLeakDump, to help w/ this -

AfxEnableMemoryLeakDump

There’s also this Visual Studio extension, Visual Leak Detector :

Visual Leak Detector for Visual C++ - Visual Studio Marketplace

These two assume you’re using code that accesses MFC within Visual Studio.

If it’s platform-agnostic C++ code, you might consider porting it over to Unix for the sake of Valgrinding.


Oct 18, 2018

Is using Tkinter to build a GUI app in Python 3 a smart decision?

Yea, it works as advertised without dragging you through hell (looking at you, MFC.)

Also, a great utility (with a SEO-disastrous name) is Page. A drag-and-drop GUI builder for TkInter A Python GUI Generator


Oct 18, 2018

What was the last programming language or framework you learned? Was it for fun, for a new side project or for work?

Flask. I came across it as part of a work project, and was delighted to learn it’s a super-light web framework for writing a web app in python right freakin’ now.

I don’t want to invert my brain so that it fits a Model-View-Controller model. I don’t want to install all kinds of crap.

I just want a web front end to some python code, and I want it in 30 minutes so I can get back to the gizmo on the back-end.

Here’s hello world -

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")

def hello():

return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":

app.run()

Yes, that’s it.

Yes, I’m serious.


Oct 18, 2018

What is the easiest way to turn a python script into an easily shared (non-commercial) program for Windows users?

pyinstaller.exe is probably already somewhere under your \python directory .

It links statically to all libraries and dependencies to provide a self-contained, distributable .exe file.

Welcome to PyInstaller official website


Oct 19, 2018

Do people recognize the term "thin privilege"?

Well. This is awkward :

The term ‘privilege’, and the dialectic surrounding it (is it or isn’t it …?) is only recognized by a small faction of the far-left.

“Privilege” is not a term accepted as valid and relevant by the majority of liberals, and virtually all conservatives.

It makes a lot of noise in academic circles but really doesn’t move the needle politically, except perhaps to fracture the Left along race and gender lines which grants advantage to the Right.

This just in, “Sober privilege.” What is Sober Privilege?

We need to check that.


Oct 19, 2018

Why can’t you use “django.db import models” when using Django with Python?

that’s

import django

from django.db import models


Oct 19, 2018

What is the difference between procedures and functions?

Functions return something, procedures don’t.


Oct 19, 2018

What will be the consequences in the world balance of political/nuclear power if the new propulsion system of the Columbia Class SSBN truly performs as intended?

According to the Navy’s public announcements, it seems an incremental improvement to the stealthiness of our nuclear fleet.

Our Ohio-class (usually just called Trident after the missiles) are pretty quiet, but still leave some room for improvement; we stopped building new ones in ‘97.

The propeller makes some noise while running, along with the driveshaft and turbine and stuff.

So the Seawolf was rushed into production but went way over budget so we only built 3 of them before cancelling the whole thing in 2005.

Now the Columbia is a (rather belated) effort to get the fleet into the 21st century. It adds additional noise damping features, mostly to the mechanical gearing of the drive-shaft - replacing it with an entirely electric gearbox.

A few considerations, though :

Running quiet is only important for passive sonar. You’re an enemy sub, and you’re trying to tail an American sub without being discovered yourself. You can’t ping or you give yourself away (and can get torpedoed. ). So you can only listen to the other guy’s engine/prop noise. It’s important to keep in mind that the sub’s ultimate purpose is a platform to launch nuclear missiles from an unknown location. So silent running is a response to the fear is that enemy subs would sneak up on all of our subs and sink them 1 minute prior to World War III. If even one or two of our subs get their missiles off, the enemy would be effectively destroyed by over 100 MIRV warheads packing 200 kilotons each.

A single ping from, say, a surface ship or sonar buoy can potentially light up everybody, making their positions mutually known to each other, eliminating any advantage from quiet propulsion.

So quiet running isn’t strategically critical to WW III. It’s important, but it won’t change the game. And of course, the subs don’t serve only as nuclear launch platforms, but that is their primary strategic purpose.

Finally, this is all from what the Navy has made public. My hunch is the total lack of any new wow stealth capabilities hints that there may be something they’re not talking about. Maybe some new-fangled propulsion like the magnetohydrodynamic thing in Hunt for Red October, some sort of phase-cancelling hull to defeat active sonar, an unmanned decoy sister sub … no telling what.

It’s hard to believe that 2 decades of research since the Seawolf has turned up nothing more than an improved drive-shaft.

(I held a Secret clearance while working for the US Navy on their nuclear sub program from 1991–1996. I have not here, nor would I ever divulge information I know to be classified at the time.)


Oct 20, 2018

Recently, I have noticed people at my middle school vaping from a Juul. What are some reasons to not give in?

Next time you see someone light a cigarette, find a polite way to ask “At what age did you start smoking?”

Get a few data points.

Average them. If you chose a representative sample, you’ll get something close to 13. The average smoker starts at the age I did - 13.

You’ll hear that answer from college kids to senior citizens. Almost none of them planned to keep smoking. I sure didn’t.

39 years ago. A while back I was able to make the switch from tobacco to vaping. I need only glance to the left of my keyboard to see my vape.

I am literally never without it. I take it to the bathroom. I sleep with it. I stand and pick it up and carry it across the room and sit down. If I make a sandwich, I take it into the kitchen with me.

4 decades of addiction because I began at 13.

You're as free as I was at 13. That freedom is yours to keep.

Or to lose.

13’s the average age so … now’s the time.

Your call.


Oct 20, 2018

What are the best software in Linux for doing the works of MS word and power point?

Libre office (Free Office Suite) is pretty … suite. And there’s also google docs for a platform independent solution.


Oct 20, 2018

What can you do to learn calculus deeply and not just memorize rote procedures?

Calculus is taught under 2 different headings in Western Universities.

Engineers and scientists need to know how to work with it, but not understand it too deeply. These courses are usually what 'calculus' refers to in universities.

The deeper understanding is taught in a course that Math majors take called Real Analysis.

So get an introductory book on that.


Oct 20, 2018

How can I implement a dynamic array in C without using a void pointer arithmetic?

Like this :

# include <stdio.h>

# include <stdlib.h>

int main()

{

int *c;

// make me an array of size 50

c = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int)*50);

// now you can say c[0], c[5], c[49] but not c[50] !

}

Technically, the malloc is returning a value of type ‘void *’, but then we’re just casting it to ‘int *’, at which point we can use ordinary array notation.


Oct 20, 2018

Conjecture: For all positive integer values of x, x and (x+1) are relatively prime. Is there a proof for this, or if not, is there a counterexample?

If x and x+1 have a common divisor p, then divide both by it.

Then x/p is an integer. But then x/p + 1/p cannot be an integer, so p is not a factor of x+1. (Contradiction, QED, That’s All She Wrote, etc.)


Oct 20, 2018

What would happen if the next Microsoft Windows was a Linux distribution and still compatible with older Windows softwares?

Hitler would be used as target practice while all of hell erupted into a snowball fight.


Oct 20, 2018

In what ways are you similar to Albert Einstein?

We were both descended from a rare breed indeed : German Jews.


Oct 20, 2018

Does Wisconsin-Madison have some famous mathematical professors or mathematical clubs?

They have an active group for the Putnam Exam. Their team came in 32nd in North America last year, not too shabby.

The Putnam is a way for an undergraduate student to distinguish themselves even if they haven’t yet learned a lot. If you do really well, graduate programs will kick their door open for you. If you do amazingly, you can go anywhere you want and do whatever.

UW Performs Well on Putnam Exam

It’s also a lot of fun (tho it’s an intense 6 hours.)

And if you don’t do well on it, it’s no big whoop. It’s a peculiar type of test, and some brilliant mathematicians don’t do well under those particular constraints.


Oct 20, 2018

I’m tired of conservatives using the constitution as a reason to not change laws. Can’t we just repeal the thing and start from scratch?

That’s like burning down a forest because you lost your pet squirrel in it.

Technically, you no longer have a squirrel lost in the forest. But there’s been some massive breakdown in perspective.


Oct 21, 2018

Why do people write GUI desktop apps in JavaScript, making them just glorified web pages? C++ is much faster, and Python is much easier to use.

Because the developer wants it to automagically work on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, iPads and Android tablets, and smartphones.

All of that can be had in one go by writing a single web app.


Oct 21, 2018

As a programmer who doesn't really get pointers, what do you think of fellow programmers who do?

There really aren’t competent programmers who don’t get pointers.

I don’t mean to be rough on people struggling with pointers - or the corresponding higher abstraction of reference vs value. It’s a tricky distinction and complex expressions with lots of pointers can be hard to eyeball even for seasoned vets.

Not getting pointers just means that you are stuck for a while on your path to becoming a good programmer. The best way to get unstuck is to accept that you’re stuck and refuse to move on until you get unstuck.

There’s a similar sand-trap in early calculus. The definition of a limit (“for every epsilon there an exists a delta such that …”) is often hard to wrap your head around, even for the most gifted students. Once you get it, it seems so easy you can’t see why it tripped you up.

My college room-mate asked me to explain it to him, and I said “The best I can say is just think about it really hard for an hour. That’s the only way I could get it.”

He went upstairs to his room. Came back an hour later “Hey! That worked!”

I doubt I can explain pointers to you any better than anyone else. The only suggestion I can make is the one I offered my room-mate.

Take some time with it and be stubborn.


Oct 21, 2018

How do I prove that \dfrac{1-\sin x}{\cos x}=\dfrac{\cos x}{1+\sin x}?

Hint 1 : square both sides.

Hint 2: sin^2+cos^2=1


Oct 22, 2018

How difficult is it to find good Python programmers?

Piece of cake - I’m always looking for remote python work.


Oct 24, 2018

In object-oriented programming, why is it bad practice to make data members public when the get() & set() public members modify it anyway?

Here’s a thought experiment: Say all our data members are public, so anybody with the object can directly tweak its members. (Ahem.)

One of the members is an integer called n. And a member function divides by n .

OK, now some idiot set n to zero. The member function doing the bad divide didn’t get called during the idiot’s use-case/code-coverage-test. It blew up when idiot #2 was expanding on idiot #1’s code. All they know is - your code blew up. It’s an unwitting conspiracy of idiots.

And now your phone is ringing. So you’ve gone from developer to idiot detective.

To the rescue : private data with get() and set(). When you set n, your object’s setter can check against zero, and error out immediately.

So we have automatic idiot-control. The thing about idiots, you have to stop them at the first misstep, long before they end up on the phone with you.

Many people use the example, “what if all the data later ends up in a database” but that doesn’t actually happen to 99.99% of classes. Classes don’t suddenly wake up and realize they need to live in a database.

This example is more practical, I think.


Oct 24, 2018

What are some computer programs that unexpectedly worked?

The global wave of year-2000 fixes. For you college kids, when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, a lot of old financial and government software had only 2 digits for the year, so that 2000 would look like 1900. It was broadly feared that there would be major finance disruptions, government meltdowns - maybe even a market crash.

So coders spent years patching software all over the globe. Problem was, you couldn’t really test it fully until the year actually did roll over to 2000. You had all this live data in different systems.

To everybody’s surprise, it all worked. Jan 1, 2000 was just another day. If memory serves, a single commuter train in Japan got briefly confused. That was it.

Those developers had the dismal and tedious task of staving off this disaster. They were touching code that in some cases hadn’t been changed in decades. Somehow, they pulled it off.


Oct 24, 2018

Is it necessary to use an IDE, like PyCharm, to build a GUI desktop application on Python? I am interested in lightweight text editors.

Not at all! I used to use simple editors almost exclusively.

Just grab the TkInter module and code away.

If you want to save some time with page layout, I recommend the drag-n-drop GUI builder named Page.


Oct 24, 2018

What is Boston's most successful song?

An excellent analysis of this question is given here - LMGTFY


Oct 25, 2018

What’s the “vaccines cause autism” of your industry?

Software development : “We’re Agile!”.

No, you’re not. Agile is not about process : stand-ups, burn-downs, story points and JIRA. None of that really matters.

Agile is radical and subversive. It’s an open declaration of war against professional managers. A Manager Mass Extinction Event.

The foundational principle of Agile is : People don’t need managers to tell them what to do next. They need information.

Who’s going to use this? What are they trying to do? What’s their timeline? What’s their budget? How important are they to our company, short- and long-term?

Let me talk to the ‘client’. Since I have direct knowledge of the technical difficulty of various features - let me negotiate with the client. Let me pick my coworkers for this.

Trust me.

Don’t pester me for status every day. Our daily meetings are internal. We’ll report to higher ups at the end of the sprint and not a day before. Our Scrum Master, who could be somebody else next week, will not report to a “Scrum of Scrums” or related nonsense. S/he will get right back to work with the rest of us.

But coders aren’t good with customers !” They know what they’re talking about. When you want to install a bath-room, you talk to a building contractor. You need them competent, not charismatic.

Coders don’t understand business!” Yea, they do. Truly Agile companies have demonstrated that.

“I’m a full-time manager with over 40 reports! I act as liason between them and upper management. Is Agile saying I should quit !?” No. Agile says you should be fired.

So that’s Agile. It generally provokes strong reactions both pro and con. Whichever side you fall on, one fact remains :

Your company isn’t doing it. You’re not Agile.


Oct 26, 2018

Where can I find qdump?

QDump has been reborn as QuArk. It works for any number of answers and is supercool and stuff.

More here - ominax.com/quark


Oct 26, 2018

Why is "QDump" unavailable?

It was a first attempt which failed. Quora presents certain … impediments to crawling all your answers.

QuArk is the actual working downloader. You can grab it here - ominax.com/quark


Oct 26, 2018

Which is the best security algorithm for encryption and decryption for storing login credentials using Python?

You never decrypt passwords, rather you store the hash of a password.

When a user attempts to login, you hash that password, and see if it matches the hash you stored at registration time.

(hash is just a function which maps a short string into a really long string of seemingly random symbols. It can’t be reversed by design. Such a function is called a Trapdoor function - Wikipedia. )

To answer your question, SHA-512 is thought to be uncrackable, even by the NSA.

See the Python function sha3_512()

in the hashlib module, hashlib - Secure hashes and message digests - Python 3.7.1 documentation


Oct 26, 2018

What were Albert Einstein's notable achievements?

Original question : What is the most important thing you learned from Albert Einstein?

Our intuitions will fail us.


Oct 26, 2018

How do I delete an element on a webpage using python selenium?

Deleting an element - or anything else that modifies the shape of the DOM tree - isn’t directly supported by Selenium.

However, Selenium does allow you to insert some JavaScript into the web page (injection) which can modify the tree.

Use the magic API function

driver.execute_script("alert('Hey! It works!');")

See 7. WebDriver API


Oct 27, 2018

Is creating a little innocent jealousy by flirting with other guys a good way to encourage your crush to ask you out?

I know gender-essentialism is heresy these days, but here’s a secret about the psyche of a secure straight male :

He is attracted to women who are 1) highly selective in their choice of men and 2) interested in them anyway.

If you think in terms of evolution and gene propagation, this is a winning strategy in the DNA game.

Flirting with other guys sends a negative signal on both counts. Really disastrous.

Also, it should be noted that flirting with him or - better yet - walking across a room-full of men, right up to him, and asking him out sends a strong positive signal on both 1) and 2). If he likes you at all, he’ll be putty in your hands.

Insecure men may be baited by jealousy, and you may briefly get what you want, until you’re at lunch with him and he says, oh so casually, “So. Who ya texting?”

Just the first of many times you’ll be answering that question.


Oct 27, 2018

How can I prove that \{\ln {x} \lt \sqrt{x} \mid x \in \R \}?

Observe that :

\sqrt{x} = \sqrt{e ^ {ln (x)}}

Now you need only show that

z < \sqrt{e ^ {z}} for all real z. (z has taken the place of ln(x) )

Watch out for z < 0 (0< x < 1), dispense with that case directly first.


Oct 27, 2018

Who is the most intelligent criminal in history? Why?

The Unabomber, Theodore “Ted” John Kaczynski, was a mathematical prodigy and budding mathematician-of-note when he dropped out of society and began his bombing campaign (which I won’t rehash here.)

He avoided capture because when it came to mail-bombing, he was good. He was really, really good. The best there ever was.

With meticulous care, he first found out how law enforcement solved this sort of crime. Then he used this knowledge to jam up the FBI. Their investigation of him was the longest ever in their history and - prior to his publishing his manifesto - they had made absolutely zero progress. He never appeared on a working suspect list. The FBI didn’t even have a good guess as to where he was, how many people he was - just nothing.

His bombs were made from ordinary household objects obtained from scrap heaps and junk yards. Anything that required any sort of manufacturing process - like a switch - he fashioned himself if at all possible. Batteries were stripped of their covers, their caps filed down to remove any numbers, markings, or other identifying characteristics.

Somehow, he never got a single finger-print on anything. Not a strand of hair, a flake of skin, a tiny droplet of saliva from a sneeze.

Next came the more devious part : He added false evidence. Hair clippings from God-knows where. Metal parts with markings intact from an antique shop in Texas. Cotton fibers from the lint-trap of a New York laundry mat. That sort of thing.

It sent the investigators chasing a thousand false leads, sifting through microscopic debris, all in vain.

“He’s been driving us up the wall for 18 years,”— Bob Holland, BATF

He sent private letters to the FBI announcing himself (and sometimes taunting them), carefully phrased to conceal his education and intelligence. The Feds profiled him as having, at best, a high school education. (He was a Harvard educated PhD.)

While he was against modern technology in all its forms, he targeted airlines in particular to send false signals regarding his motives. Pissed-off airline employee?

He’d take a 24-hour bus ride to drop the package into a distant mailbox, causing the FBI to think he was in California, not Montana.

He stopped mailing bombs for a period of six years, making the Feds wonder if he’d blown himself up. Investigators experienced with his case got reassigned to more urgent matters.

Then he started again.

He was playing several chess moves ahead of the Feds. He managed to arrange things such that - the more you investigated the crime, the less you knew about him.

Diabolically brilliant.

The story of his crimes and capture is rendered in gripping detail in the Netflix Miniseries : Manhunt | Netflix (The FBI backstory strays considerably from reality, but the rest is pretty factual.) Critic reviews : Manhunt: UNABOMBER


Oct 27, 2018

Is there a way to stop unqualified people from answering a question when I request answers from those that have the qualifications to answer more appropriately?

On Quora, you don’t own the Question, and the Answers aren’t really directed at you either.

Both exist for the benefit of everyone.


Oct 28, 2018

How do I sketch the graph of f(x) = -x^3 +x^2 -x -3 (showing clearly the stationary points, points of inflection, intercept and the turning point)?

This online graphic calculator makes quick work of that -

Desmos graph


Oct 28, 2018

How should I respond when people say events like the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting are justifiable, because of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians?

The shooter’s reason, to use the word generously, had nothing to do with Palestine. He thought somehow Jews were responsible for illegal immigration across our southern border.

I am quite confident the shooter would be unable to locate Palestine on a map of the State of Palestine.


Oct 28, 2018

How can you know if your question has been downvoted and why not go in and block all followers as to prevent this since you must be a member to downvote and have no idea who it might be?

You can’t know who down-voted you.

More importantly : Let it go. By putting so much energy into reacting to negative responses, you divert energy from positive responses and creating new content.

Feed the good wolf.


Oct 28, 2018

If geologic records during primate history prove 10 degree swings, why do scientists estimate apocalypse well under 4 degree estimations?

We do see temperature increases of 8–14 F as the earth warms out of an ice age and starts its interglacial period of warm climate - like we have now.

These warm periods last about 10,000 years, and climate cools an equal amount to return to its normal glacial period (during which New York City is under a mile of ice.) The cycle maintains a steady base-line :

The problem with 4 degrees F of added warming is it is in addition to 10-or-so degrees we get from being in an interglacial already. So we’re something like 14 degrees above glacial. That’s not a temperature the Earth has experienced since the dawn of man - or the great apes, for that matter.

To see the effects of abruptly adding 4 degrees to an already warm planet, we can look at 250 M years ago. In Siberia, there was a flood basalt eruption (thousands of square miles turned into molten lava shooting flame into the sky.) Enough CO2 was emitted to warm the planet 12 degrees F.

That warming triggered the oceans to release their methane stores. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the earth warmed another 12 degrees.

This triggered the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, also called The Great Dying. This was no mere meteor that killed off the largest land animals.

The PT extinction killed nearly every tree, most plants, most fish, every bird and almost every land vertebrate. 90% of the biodiversity of Earth was wiped out. Evolution’s progress took a massive backward tumble, and this land vertebrate, the Lystrosaurus, had the surface of the Earth almost entirely to himself for millions of years (about the size of a pig.)

That’s what 12 degrees F of sudden warming did.

A proposed 4 degree rise is clearly … cause for concern.


Oct 30, 2018

Logically speaking, how is healthcare a privilege and not a right?

I believe in universal healthcare, but let’s be clear on terms.

Rights are granted by the government.

Therefore, the thing conferred by the right must be something that belongs to the government in the first place.

Thus most of the rights enumerated in the constitution don’t deliver a good or service to people, rather they restrain the government from stopping you.

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you get a Macbook to write in. It just means you can’t be arrested for saying whatever you want.

The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you get an AR-15 courtesy of Washington. It just means the government can’t seize your firearms.

And so on.

Your other rights are governmental protection against other people. The right to be secure in your person, your home and property against criminals.

Now - healthcare as a right is a real problem, because the government does not own every doctor, nurse, hospital and PA. And it’s not just people with medical credentials, healthcare involves all manner of work from carpentry, plumbing, sweeping and mopping.

In order to grant these things to you as a right, the government must at first seize them all, so it’s theirs to give.

Which means the government - in defense of this right - must coerce your fellow citizens into providing this service.

Put simply : You get a notice to appear for the night-shift to empty bedpans and mop bathrooms at your local hospital. Failure to appear can result in a fine and up to 30 days imprisonment.

I agree that universal healthcare is a wise national investment in its citizenry. Labeling it a right, however, serves to corrode rather than uphold the ideal of human rights.

So let’s be honest. Healthcare is not a right. Like education and roads, it falls into that uneasy balance between the individual and collective good. Something that we pay for by coercing money from taxpayers at gunpoint. Armed robbery for the greater good, but with the thoughtful hesitance we must bring to the grey area between right and good.


Oct 30, 2018

How do I solve a GNU GRUB 2.02 error? I can't log into Windows, and my laptop can't install Linux.

There are some rescue tools you can try, but I always have the best luck just by installing a small LUbuntu partition, and let its GRUB install sort out the mess for you.

Just make a 15GB partition to install to, you can blow it away later.

lubuntu

Make a bootable USB (from a working computer) and boot from that, bypassing your GRUB altogether.


Oct 31, 2018

You 've just built software that works like a charm for all inputs within its specifications. Your boss is asking you to either change it to be multithreaded or make it handle inputs 10^10 larger than it currently can. Which one would you choose?

To riff on Alan Mellor ‘s answer, before I’d answer I’d back up to examine the question.

Because there is actually something very common and very important going on here. I’d answer by finding a nice way to ask, “Why are you asking me this now?” (Actually that’s exactly how I’d ask it, but I admire those with more tact than I have.)

A lot of people who give work to software developers suffer from the fatal misconception that giving a small portion of the total requirements helps the coder move forward in stages.

It doesn’t. Once I wrote some code that pulls inventory information from a vendors website.

Then they turned around and said, “OK the real problem is the inventory list is 100x larger than that.” Now it needed multiple threads, recovery logic if a server logged too many requests. Now it needed a week to run a test, not an hour. Now we had to explore carving the job out between N processes, and merging the results.

Why are you asking me this now?”

This is an entirely different project. It has a different cost, timeline for development - you start in a completely different way. A GUI I had written to monitor and configure the thing was pointless now, a total waste. And so on.

I had to tell them that this new job was completely different, and not one that I would actually want. I have since learned to insist on knowing what a client’s complete, ultimate goal is. “Don’t leave anything out, it all matters on day one.”

Giving requirements in stages is like asking an architect to design a shoe store. They hand you the blue-prints and you say, “Great, now just make it a shopping mall. 60 stores like this (not all shoes, obviously, but that shouldn’t affect the design), a food court and an escalator. Oh! And a cool fountain maybe? I guess a parking garage … Anyway. Just scale up what you have!


Oct 31, 2018

What Python frameworks and concepts are musts for a CS grad to become a Python developer?

Python is very akin to most other popular, multi-paradigm languages. General patterns like Class and loop will carry over from, say, JavaScript.

This makes it very easy to get started, but also very easy to write bad Python.

And I’m not just talking about style. Bad python means lots of extra code. And extra code means extra bugs.

To avoid this trap, there are two fundamental areas where Python differs from your favorite language. Learning these first will make your transition to Python more pleasant and productive :

List comprehensions are a more compact and clearer way to deal with lists :

List Comprehensions in Python

Instead of this,

new_list=[]

for item in list:

if conditional(item):

new_list.append(expression(item))

We do this,

new_list = [expression(item) for item in list if conditional(i)]

The problem with beginners is the first way works. So they don’t learn the second. If you embrace list comprehensions right away, you’ll write less code and be better able to read other’s code.

Python’s here to help. Give it a chance to. In general, you’ll find that people on StackOverflow and elsewhere refer to the “Pythonic” way to do things.

List comprehensions is a big part of being Pythonic. In general, even if you know how to do something, explore the most Pythonic way to do it.

The second Big Thing to understand is how Python passes arguments to functions. We are used to pass-by-value and pass-by-reference, often coexisting in the same language. Python does a weird hybrid called pass-by-assignment.

It’s often like pass-by-value, so beginning programmers tend to think of that way and move on. Then it stops being like pass-by-value and their code breaks.

So learn pass-by-assignment up front, Christopher Reiss's answer to How do you pass by value and pass by reference in Python?

And here’s a cheat : if you pass all arguments in a dictionary , they will behave as if passed-by-reference.


Nov 1, 2018

Do you consider “nother” a word when used in phrases like “That’s a whole nother topic”?

In modern usage, it’s wrong.

Oxford catalogs its use beginning around 1400, synonymous with ‘other’. ‘Other’ presents pronunciation difficulties, because it has no hard syllables. Even in modern usage we tend to much prefer “That’s another thing entirely” rather than “That’s an entirely other thing.”

By 1600–1700 the other/nother thing began to great on people’s nerves, and they began to prefer other and to write use an apostrophe like so : n’other. The problem here was the apostrophe didn’t actually represent any missing letters.

By the 20th century ‘nother’ became grudgingly admitted into the dictionary as a common bit of slang with no place in proper writing. We did keep the word “another”, but did we jam together “an other” or “a nother” ?

Can’t tell. It’s the perfect crime.


Nov 1, 2018

Do men get scared/turned off by women asking them on a date? I asked a guy for a 2nd date and he completely stopped talking to me, though we were talking fine prior.

That’s straight up weird. (In urban American culture, anyway.)

I’d suspect there’s More To The Story. (He has another love interest, may be struggling with his sexual orientation [or just isn’t out], is nursing any number of personal problems, and most likely Other.)


Nov 1, 2018

Honestly, Jews, how could you forgive Germans for destroying so many?

I picture the German children in 1945, scrambling through the rubble of cities or walking for days from their former homelands in places like Poland, which were now deporting German-speaking people en masse.

How impossible it was for their parents to explain … How it had come to this. How this is not normal. How it’s going to be OK.

How it will never happen again.

Every modern German you meet descends from one of these children. We can’t go back in time and comfort that child in ‘45. But we can certainly be kind to their progeny.


Nov 1, 2018

If you were teleported to 1970 and someone asked you to prove you were from the future, what would you show or tell them?

At coordinates 41.726931° N and -49.948253° W, at a depth of 12,000 feet you will find the wreckage of the Titanic.

You’re welcome.

All I want in return is a permanent VIP pass to Studio 54 when it opens in ‘77. Maybe some Hendrix tickets.

Pol Pot and Idi Amin - you’re gonna wanna shoot them guys in the face right now. Trust.


Nov 1, 2018

If you could witness any event from history, what would it be?

Dealey Plaza, Dallas TX when Kennedy got shot. I think I’d settle for any vantage point : 6th floor of bookstore repository, grassy knoll, railway yard or triple over-pass.

I’d have the advantage of knowing where to look. And I’d be really careful not to bump into Zapruder, causing him to drop and break his camera.


Nov 2, 2018

What do you think of Google’s interpretation of the “top writers” on Quora? Did you notice the carousel is filled with just men?

It also has Newton, Einstein and Feynman.

I’d call it a fail.


Nov 2, 2018

How can I use my GPU for accelerated computing, like to speed up a specific program or task?

This really only works for computationally intensive programs. Lots of number-crunching.

The simplest case is Array operations. These are naturally amenable to being farmed out to multiple, smaller processers (a GPU is a collection of 1000 or so of these.)

If all you need to do is add and multiply arrays, you can put your GPU to work without too much trouble. I’ll use Python for my examples :

The numba package is perhaps the softest touch, by wrapping certain functions in decorators you can automagically farm out operations to your GPU.

ArrayFire is also a simple package that just provides you with Array structures ready to fire off on the GPU.

If you want to put in a bit more effort but achieve bigger and broader performance gains, Theanos and PyTorch are feature-rich and most commonly used in scientific computing and machine learning.

Finally, unless your calculations are fairly simple matrix operations, it is usually the case you can get a 10x performance boost by writing your own OpenCL or CUDA code. These are C-like languages that give you precise control over each of the GPU’s processing unit, memory management, and all that.

I usually begin with something like PyTorch but then port the computation to raw CUDA code. You can link to CUDA code from Python so you don’t normally have to look at that cryptic stuff.

All these suggestions work for both OpenCL (AMD-backed, Open Source) and CUDA (NVidia owned, closed source.) Which to choose?

I disagree with other posters that OpenCL should be your default choice. I’m all for OpenCL’s Open Source attitude and all, but NVidia owns the GPU market with twice AMD’s marketshare.

The hardware is better IMO, the support is better, more people are going to be able to help you. NVidia’s free IDE for writing CUDA code, NVIDIA Nsight | NVIDIA, is simply without rival.

CUDA’s the clear winner for people with Other Things To Do.


Nov 3, 2018

How can we shift all elements one by one to the right and move the last element into the first position in Python?

[my_list.pop()] + my_list


Nov 3, 2018

What's the funniest movie scene to watch as a software developer?

Office space. You really can’t be a programmer without watching it, or you’ll miss some of the inside jokes which continue to echo in the modern workplace :

Office Space (1999)


Nov 3, 2018

What was Hitler's fatal mistake in invading Russia, so that he would get repelled in the end?

A couple of things come to mind :

He didn’t gather enough intelligence about the Soviet’s military and industrial capacity.

The Soviets had what many consider the best tank in the world at the time, the T-34. Lots and lots of them. Nothing checkmates the Blitzkrieg’s mechanized, fast-moving front like another one coming the opposite way.

T-34 tank. That sloped armor caused shells to bounce up and off the tank. The only way the Germans could kill it was with Anti-Aircraft guns. The T-34 profoundly impacted tank design ever since.

Stalin had only recently industrialized the USSR. Rather than the century-long organic emergence of heavy industry in places like Germany and the US, Soviet industry was deployed on a grand scale in a short period. Factories were modularized, transported by rail and assembled at their destination.

What was built quickly can be moved quickly. The Soviets were able to move their factories into the East, far from harm’s way.

So the Soviets had better weapons and the ability to make more.

He was relying on good luck. Hitler, flush from an unbroken string of successes. believed that Fate or some such bullshit would always be on his side. If everything went well, the Wehrmacht should have made it to Moscow in time for Christmas Eve. Along with both sides of the Volga River and the oil fields in the south.

Things did not go well in October when freakishly heavy rains buried the Wehrmacht in mud. The mechanized infantry was stuck and the supply line was clogged to a near-stop.

The bigger they are, the deeper they sink.” Wehrmacht stuck in the mud.

There was no backup plan for this contingency. This gave the Soviets the time they needed to train a massive supply of fresh soldiers for winter combat in Siberia.

He let the SS go berserk. Some Soviet people would actually have been glad to be rid of Stalin, and weren’t initially so hostile to advancing German armies. The SS put a stop to that as they rounded up and executed civilians - especially those in former positions of authority. This engendered such an intense hatred of the Nazis that even troops that had been over-run by the front - but evaded capture - tended to regroup and attack from behind enemy lines - a nearly suicidal tactic that allowed the Wehrmacht not a moment’s rest.

A Red Army unit, caught behind enemy lines, ready a counter-attack from within Nazi-occupied Russia.

In summary, Hitler didn’t learn about his enemy, didn’t leave room for unexpected setbacks, and didn’t realize that the worse he treated the enemy - the harder they would fight.


Nov 3, 2018

How can we prove that \sinh x= \frac{e^x-e^{-x}}{2}\text { and also }\cosh x = \frac{e^x+e^{-x}}{2}?

We can’t.

Those are the definitions of sinh and cosh . We have found it convenient to give those expressions names so we don’t have to rewrite them all the time.

Nothing more.


Nov 4, 2018

What is the limit, as x approaches 0 of [ln(2x+1)-ln(1-3x)]/x using the definition of the derivative?

Use the fact that ln(a)-ln(b) = ln(b/a), and then apply L'Hopital's Rule .


Nov 4, 2018

What do you wish you knew before becoming a software engineer?

When you hit a problem that you just can’t figure out, not an inch of progress - take a 2 hour break.

Unless you’re way too busy for that.

Then you need a break for 2 days.


Nov 4, 2018

I'm trying to remember the name of a movie, it talks about theoretical situations, like super volcanoes could you help me?

Are you thinking of End Day ?

End Day (TV Movie 2005)

It tells the story of a scientist reliving the same day, where calamity strikes the planet in various ways : Super-volcano creates mega-tsunami, meteor strikes Berlin, super-collider unleashes a quantum strangelet or some such thing …


Nov 5, 2018

What are your thoughts on The Walking Dead expanding into movies?

Nah - the walking dead never recovered from “Swinging the bat” in the Season 7 Premiere which sadistically killed off beloved characters, and dragged the audience through a depressing, maudlin, otherwise vacuous 60 minutes which permanently lost them millions of fans.

(Will ‘swing the bat’ enter the entertainment lexicon along with ‘jump the shark’?)

What made the Walking Dead fun to watch wasn’t just the gore and destruction. Rather, it was the little islands of humanity that arose in an ocean of doom.

Life got simpler and more authentic. It became reduced to trusted friends and defenders, small villages, great crusades to secure such simple things as gas or medication. All the world is hostile and dangerous except for the little camp of survivors that has become home.

It was that sanctuary that kept us watching. How people got along, fell in love, learned to shoot, shook off the past. Planting fragile gardens as death swirled just outside their walls.

That episode obliterated this precarious duality. The sanctuary was over-run and now everything was death. This wasn’t just depressing - it was boring. That was the last episode I watched, because I lost any emotional attachment to the characters. I just didn’t care.


Nov 5, 2018

Questions with neutral language concerning Obama are often said to have violated Quora’s policy on questions. How can I fight liberal censorship on Quora?

Life is a lot easier to navigate if you accept that sometimes the umpire makes the wrong call.

It’s just part of the game. Play on.


Nov 6, 2018

If the goal of creating C++ was to correct the shortfalls of C, why are more people learning C than C++ even today?

C++ wasn’t about correcting general shortfalls; as a low level systems language C was near-perfect. It was really like the ultimate macro-assembler. Many people who wrote C could read the hex-dump of the resultant binary, and read along as the compiler did a fairly direct translation to machine code.

C++ was about objects and moving upward from system-level tasks like device-drivers toward high-level tasks like GUI implementation. Here speed became less critical, more programmers were working on larger code-bases, more programmers who were less interested in where every byte was and more prone to make a fatal low-level mistake. Massive code-bases that needed classes to hide complexity,

For these programmers, C++ sacrificed speed, memory and simplicity in order to offer Objects, memory safety, data containers and all that jazz.

C is still the best language if you want to write the fastest possible code and pinky-swear not to fuck it up.


Nov 6, 2018

Riccardo Spagni, a Monero (XMR) core team member and lead developer, called Ethereum (ETH) an idiotic and unscalable idea. What do you think of these comments?

I disagree profusely. I think Spagni does too.

Most altcoins are nonsense. There are only two fundamental areas where Bitcoin could be improved :

Privacy. Bitcoin transactions are traceable as hell. Manifest for all the world to see.

Transaction complexity. Bitcoin offers only a single, unconditional payment. You hand someone money.

There are other shortcomings of course involving how inflation/supply is managed, the cost of transaction processes, but these are more in the implementation and less the fundamental character of what the currency can actually do.

Several alt-coins address the privacy issue head-on. Monero is my favorite, reasonable people differ with me and prefer ZCash or a third option.

Ethereum takes on the complexity issue, by creating smart contracts. Because an economy doesn’t involve just handing people money, rather it’s an exchange of money for goods and services. In the law this is called “consideration”, what do I get for what I give.

The Ethereum platform enables two parties to implement a smart contract in code that lives on the blockchain. I pay you $100 for a light saber. The contract gets the tracking number of the package, and on the day it arrives I have to either accept the package or send it back and provide that tracking number.

If all goes well, the contract releases my money to the shipper.

The potential of this is staggering. A tangled global cluster-fuck of laws, courts, online reputations and such is replaced by an impartial, logical, transparent piece of code.

Ethereum has no viable competitor and actually - is the basis on which many altcoins are built.

Now, Spagni is infamous for trash-talk. He likes to throw outrageous criticism at other alt-coins. He often introduces himself as "the biggest troll on the internet."

But Ethereum is truly awesome and Spagni knows it.


Nov 7, 2018

Should Hitler have built his army for a few more years before attacking Poland, to improve Germany's chances in World War II?

Hindsight and all, but there is one possible path to victory that may have worked for Germany. It’s not about starting later, when their military was more built up - but rather stopping sooner, before they had roused the anger of most of the industrialized world.

Here’s a map of territory controlled by the Third Reich and her allies just before the invasion of the USSR :

Sitting pretty. Hitler’s main problem was Churchill, who would not come to terms despite Germany’s repeated exhortations. Hitler never wanted war on his Western border, he had hoped (somehow) France and Great Britain would stand down.

Both Hitler and Stalin hated each other and expected war to erupt between them, just not right away.

An interesting “what if” is this - Hitler could have suddenly withdrawn from France, his only demand being they agree not to attack Germany nor allow any other nation to do so through their territory. Hard to argue with that.

Then hit not Pause, but Stop. Extend the non-aggression pact with the USSR by another 5 years, or make it permanent. Sever the alliance with Japan and condemn their attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite the fact that Hitler had demonstrated that he could not be trusted, ceding France would provide credible assurance that he had no designs on Western Europe or Great Britain.

Churchill would find himself trying to cope with rising British dissent over the war, especially since the British Expeditionary Force had barely made it out of France by the skin of their teeth.

America would start to see this as yet another European war of empires which was winding down, this time in Germany’s favor.

Stalin would be scared shit-less, since Hitler swore to invade them in Mein Kampf. Which would suit the Western Powers just fine, communist agitators were causing no end of trouble in the Western democracies.

Hitler could have just fortified his defenses and sat tight.

There is recent evidence that Rudolph Hess’ flight to Scotland to negotiate peace just before the invasion of the USSR was not the crazy plan of a lone nut, as historians have broadly branded it. Rather, Hess indeed carried a detailed peace treaty, carefully laid out on the Fuhrer’s stationary, offering to withdraw from Western Europe (France) entirely if peace terms could be reached.

Nazis 'offered to leave western Europe in exchange for free hand to attack USSR'

So the Nazis were actually willing to do that, or at least were thinking about it. I doubt anyone could have talked Hitler out of attacking the USSR, but it’s interesting (and chilling) to consider the possibility that he pre-emptively withdrew from France without a guarantee from GB, and then refrained from the fatal attack on the Soviet Union.


Nov 9, 2018

What is the most accidentally slick thing you said to a girl?

I was standing outside a hipster cafe in Salem, MA smoking a cigarette.

A woman came out and she was Drop.

Dead.

Gorgeous.

Movie star gorgeous. If looks could kill she’d be the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

My brain turned to nacho dip.

She put a cigarette in her mouth and then she fumbled for a light. I produced my trusty Zippo and wordlessly lit her cigarette for her.

She took a drag and looked at me with a glint in her eyes that said “ah, thanks.”

I only said,

“I bet you have never lit a cigarette in your entire life.”


Nov 9, 2018

Was Jim Acosta at all out of line at the White House press conference?

Sure.

Most of his question was editorializing. While this is nothing new, reporters need to find a way to wrap their editorial in an actual question.

“ … As you know, Mr. President, this is not an invasion, this is a group of immigrants heading for the southern border of the US … You ran a campaign ad showing migrants pouring over walls - they’re not going to be doing that … They are hundreds of miles away. Hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That’s not an invasion …”

This isn’t a question, Acosta is stating his views. Trump let him do that. Trump even called on him first, usually considered a nod of respect among the White House pool.

Acosta then tried a follow up question, which the President is under no obligation to allow. Trump called on another reporter, but Acosta refused to yield the mike, physically pulling it out of the grasp of a White House aid who tried to take it.

To be clear : I hate Trump. He’s our worst president ever and has permanently damaged the office itself, America’s reputation abroad, and done long-term damage to our democracy as a whole.

But this reporter, on that day, was out of line.


Nov 10, 2018

Should I hire a programmer who could not order an array of integers using a sorting algorithm?

I’m not sure you should be doing the hiring. In real world applications, sorting an array of integers is usually the absolute worst way to order it.

You have to ask about the range of the integers first. If they are zip codes, or years, anything with 5 digits or so and somewhat ‘dense’, you order them by not ordering them.

You count them. For each n, count[n] ++ .

Or did you tell the candidate they must use a sorting algorithm? I’d suggest :

Real world problems don’t dictate how to solve them.

Asking a candidate a perfectly prescribed question is like asking a person to dance in a telephone booth. Maybe they can do it, maybe they can’t - either way you still have no idea if they can dance.

Working programmers sort an array by calling a .sort() method. Full stop. Exclamation point.

Relax. Back up. Let the candidate play with the question, modify it, expand it - or pose a better question.

Anyone can memorize a shell-sort. You want to hire the person who understands what’s it’s good for.


Nov 10, 2018

Is there a purpose for using a functional programming language for a program that is inherently stateful?

Functional programs have state. (I can’t think of any useful software that doesn’t.)

For single-threaded, it has a whole stack of states (the call-stack.) For multi-threaded, it’s a whole tree of states!

Functional programming forbids side effects. “Side effects” really means jumping down the callstack. Functional enforces that only the deepest state (top of the call stack) can change. Code can’t go jumping down the call-stack to directly bash anything.

So a function can change its local variables. No globals, no passing-by-reference. If you want to modify something, you have to return that modified thing. Even if you are sorting a million strings, you don’t do it in place, you return a new, sorted list.

The function exits, the top of the call-stack pops off, all its locals are destroyed and only the returned value remains at the new top of the stack (the calling function.)

And so it goes, all the way to the bottom of your stack, which is often stateful as hell, lots of data all over the place.

So Functional programming isn’t about eliminating state, rather it’s about isolating sub-states so they don’t interfere with each other. A function changes the state of its parent at exactly one time and place : when it returns a value.

What’s it good for ? Multiprocessing, for one. While multiprocessing historically is done in a variant of C (like OpenCL or CUDA), the future most likely belongs to functional programming which naturally keep parallel processes from getting into lock conditions over data.

In more immediate terms, functional programming is easier to debug and to gain high confidence in. Due to the controlled way that data flows up and down the stack, there are just fewer things to go wrong.

If I had to write code that would guide the Mars probe safely down to the surface, I’d want to write it in a functional language. It’s easier for me and for others to check.

(In formal terms, functional languages are more amenable to formal proofs of correctness Lecture 9: Proofs of Program Correctness. While such proofs do not exist for all programs, they do exist for some - and using a functional language helps end up in that magic subset. Formal proofs are rarely created in practice. But if I were writing code for the Mars lander, I’d give it serious consideration.)


Nov 11, 2018

Why would someone use the comment section (located right under the question) for a question instead of typing out their reply in the answer box?

I think that’s a mistake a lot of folks make on the mobile app.


Nov 12, 2018

What screams "I want to code but am too lazy to learn"?

Asking about “codes” in the plural form.


Nov 13, 2018

How can I increase the performance of my Ubuntu PC?

The bottleneck for slow machines is almost always RAM and Graphics Processing.

So drop the load on both of those. A quick way to do that is use the Lubuntu Lubuntu - Ubuntu Wiki distribution (Light Ubuntu.) Lubuntu takes memory and graphics use down to a bare minimum. Good performance at 250 MB of RAM, great performance at 500 MB.

Meaning if you have 2GB, almost all of it is free for RAM hungry stuff like web browsing.

Speaking of which, the next thing to do is optimize your web browser. I like Firefox - just make sure you update it and implement the latest round of speed-tweaks :

12 Ways to Speed Up Firefox Quantum - Make Tech Easier

(Most importantly, turn off tab multiprocessing, that’s a RAM killer.)

If you’re like me, and often watch a youtube video on breaks or just use it to listen to music, don’t do that through your browser. Install QMPlay2 instead, it’s far more resource-efficient.


Nov 13, 2018

Didn't the person who wrote world's first compiler have to compile it somehow? Did she compile it at all, and if she did, how did she do that?

This isn’t as hard as it sounds! This is a task that wasn’t done just once. There wasn’t an initial Big Bang compiler from which all other compilers descended. This work was repeated throughout the 60’s and 70’s, with hundreds of groups starting from scratch.

A CPU rolling off the assembly line is already programmable in machine code. These were instructions of a single byte. Some early computers made you enter them in binary with toggle switches; others had card readers or some other handier mechanism for entering Hex notation.

It looked like this -

On the left are the hex codes. On the right is the ‘Assembly language’ translation of the hex codes. They are just a 1–1 label that people assigned to each hex code so that it was easier to read. (In this example, hex B8 translates to ‘mov1’.)

At first, humans would create the Assembly Language annotation by hand, and then hand-translate it into Hex code.

This got tedious quickly, so usually the very first program they’d write is an “Assembler”, which translated from Assembly to Machine code and back again.

Then they’d give the Assembler some features that aided in book-keeping, like giving a name to memory locations - a variable name, essentially. Also - a name for an instruction to GOTO. These and other features were called a Macro Assembler.

So they would write a Macro Assembler in Assembly, hand-translate it to machine code - and from then on they could just write in Assembly and not have to look at hex codes.

From here, it’s pretty straighforward to write any language you want. C and Lisp were especially easy to write in Assembly, so they became the primary base-languages in academia and research toward the late 60’s.

Bill Gates and friends did this yet again in 1978 to considerable financial advantage when they came up with the Basic programming language for the 6502 processor. Here’s a piece …

CHRGET: INC\\tCHRGET+7\\t;INCREMENT THE WHOLE TXTPTR.

\\tBNE\\tCHRGOT

\\tINC\\tCHRGET+8

CHRGOT: LDA\\t60000\\t\\t;A LOAD WITH AN EXT ADDR.

TXTPTR= CHRGOT+1

\\tCMPI\\t" "\\t\\t;SKIP SPACES.

\\tBEQ\\tCHRGET

QNUM:\\tCMPI\\t":"\\t\\t;IS IT A ":"?

\\tBCS\\tCHRRTS\\t\\t;IT IS .GE. ":"

\\tSEC

\\tSBCI\\t"0"\\t\\t;ALL CHARS .GT. "9" HAVE RET'D SO

\\tSEC

\\tSBCI\\t256-"0"\\t\\t;SEE IF NUMERIC.

\\t\\t\\t\\t;TURN CARRY ON IF NUMERIC.

\\t\\t\\t\\t;ALSO, SETZ IF NULL.

CHRRTS: RTS\\t\\t\\t;RETURN TO CALLER.

RNDX:\\t128\\t\\t\\t;LOADED OR FROM ROM.

\\t79\\t\\t\\t;THE INITIAL RANDOM NUMBER.

\\t199

\\t82

IFN\\tADDPRC,<89>\\t\\t;ONE MORE BYTE.

ORG\\t255\\t\\t\\t;PAGE 1 STUFF COMING UP.

LOFBUF: BLOCK\\t1\\t\\t;THE LOW FAC BUFFER. COPYABLE.

;--- PAGE ZERO/ONE BOUNDARY ---.

\\t\\t\\t\\t;MUST HAVE 13 CONTIGUOUS BYTES.

FBUFFR: BLOCK\\t3*ADDPRC+13\\t;BUFFER FOR "FOUT".

\\t\\t\\t\\t;ON PAGE 1 SO THAT STRING IS NOT COPIED.

;STACK IS LOCATED HERE. IE FROM THE END OF FBUFFR TO STKEND.

PAGE

SUBTTL\\tDISPATCH TABLES, RESERVED WORDS, AND ERROR TEXTS.

\\tORG\\tROMLOC

STMDSP: ADR(END-1)

Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Original Source Code [1978]


Nov 14, 2018

How do you remove the second occurrence of some text in a string in Python? For example, in a string like "Bob is there for Bob", how do you leave the first "Bob" and remove the second?

A set is a handy structure for removing duplicates. It will ignore an effort to add the same thing twice.

>>> # NOT THIS WAY - order doesn't come out right.

>>> x = "Bob is there for Bob"

>>> " ".join(set(x.split(" ")))

'Bob there is for'

Almost there, but notice though how the order got messed up. (Thanks to Tony Flury for this correction) .

So let’s make an ordered set from an OrderedDict (just the keys) :

>>> from collections import OrderedDict

>>> x = "Bob is there for Bob"

>>> " ".join(OrderedDict.fromkeys(x.split(" ")))

'Bob is there for'


Nov 15, 2018

What are the downsides of Python today?

Python’s my favorite language, but I have two basic beefs with it :

Whitespace semantics (making indentation part of the syntax) was a fine experiment that ended badly. Turns out it’s a total pain in the ass. Tabs and spaces get mixed up, so pasting code can go wrong easily. It’s positively disastrous for some applications like web2py, which makes Python into a web templating language. Here you have to step over the indents like a mine-field, holding the interpreter’s hand as it bitches and moans. It’s also really easy to close the wrong number of compound statements when you’re backing out. Braces weren’t broken and didn’t need fixing.

It’s easy to do badly (Karaoke effect). The language does a lot on a novice’s first day, with its rich set of libraries and clear syntax. This is great, but most initiates avoid learning the extra Python bits that make code super concise and clear - especially List Comprehensions in Python (with honorable mention to Python Closures: How to use it and Why? and Python map() Function and whatever else I’m forgetting.) So people tend to write code like this -

new_list = []

for i in old_list:

if filt_r(i): #careful - 'filter' is a reserved word

new_list.append(expressions(i))

Instead of the clearer and more concise equivalent -

new_list = [expression(i) for i in old_list if filt_r(i)]

Yea, it does look weird at first but with a little practice you appreciate how it gets straight to the point.

So it’s advisable to resist following the ‘greedy algorithm’ of making something work using your accustomed habits and moving instantly on, but rather pause and look up the most “pythonic” way to do it. Most people put this off (I sure did) and leave a lot of bad Python in their wake.


Nov 15, 2018

When does code become AI?

When the person who wrote it can’t predict what it will do.


Nov 15, 2018

What does "Hey, tough guy!" mean?

Somebody is ready to kick your ass, if you don’t chill out.


Nov 15, 2018

Is it ok to end a friendship because you have different political views?

Well, I’ve got close friends all across the political spectrum. I like it that way. I hate to think that if my views were to change (and one should always be re-examing their views), I’d have to go shopping for a new group of friends.

Racism or sexism would be the only place I’d draw the line. But of the objectively verifiable sort, not “implicit”, “systemic”, “internalized” or similar terms sometimes used to brand people racist over their objection.


Nov 16, 2018

As a programmer, what was your biggest time saving hack?

Name your files with as much care as you name your variables.

It was years before I realized it.

OK, it was this year.

Alright, alright - it was 15 minutes ago.

While many programmers learn to give variables a descriptive name like -

gradientDescentIncrement

we will call the file the first damn thing that pops into our head and is easy to type like np.py

A week later we have no idea what the file does.

I don’t know why we do this. But everybody does. Don’t look at me that way.

You do so.

So take a few seconds to name it noun_cluster_parser.py


Nov 17, 2018

If you are programming in Python, regarding performance, are algorithms the only thing you should concern yourself with?

The most general cause of slow-downs in Python are due to duck-typing and over-use of lists.

Python figures out the type of a variable at run-time. The type can even change. This slows down Python every time it (de-)references a variable.

So a quick way to speed up your code is use Cython - which adds type declarations to Python for a big speed boost.

Cython tutorial : Python Programming Tutorials

Cython’s a superset of Python, so your old code should run right away. So if you have, say, this vanilla Python -

def test(x):

y = 0

for i in range(x):

y += i

return y

It’ll run. But you can also add type declarations like this -

def test(int x):

cdef int y = 0

cdef int i

for i in range(x):

y += i

return y

Now Python doesn’t have to poke variables with a stick to guess their type.

Secondly, It can be a hundred times faster to look up an element in a set rather than a list. You can make a set out of a list by saying : my_set = set(my_list) .

So these are two cheap and easy ways to speed up your code. But the first step is to always profile it, don’t speed up any code until you know a significant % of time is spent there.

The traditional way to start profiling is with cProfile Profiling Python using cProfile: a concrete case , but there’s a new one out that I haven’t tried yet but is getting some rave reviews called py-spy, http:://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/08/an-awesome-new-python-profiler--py-spy-/


Nov 18, 2018

Is Salem, MA a nice place to live? Is it racist?

Salem MA is a very nice place. I haven’t seen a whiff of racism there ever (though I’m a white dude, so insert grain of salt. Or pepper.) Salem lost some native sons in the Civil War, and is proud of their past as the last stop in the Underground Railroad where freed slaves were hidden all over town and snuck by boat into Canada.

Racism is only detectable in the poorer towns south of Salem in places like Revere and Dorchester (sorry, guys.)

It is exceedingly gay friendly and embracing of all sorts of people. Lots of wiccans, artists, musicians. It’s only 40 minutes by rail to Boston so it has a lot of Boston-workers cheating the Boston housing shortage.

It is a little white. I don’t know why. Which means if you are a person of color, it’s probably easier to make new friends here. After 4 hundred years, beige is getting old.

What it really has going for it is that it’s essentially a resort town. A place people come during the Summer and Fall temporarily. Within just 1/2 mile there are dozens of restaurants, shops, many people don’t drive at all here. You can go to an art museum, go to the cinema, have Thai food, buy some weird stuff for you sister and go out for beer and live music in the same 200 yard walk.


Nov 19, 2018

What's the most ignorant thing you've heard a software developer say that made you wonder how they are a programmer?

I swear to God.

This was a Senior Developer, at Nokia. He was hired from a major networking company. Supposedly had years of C++ experience.

Comes up to me one day, “When a class news some memory, it gets cleaned up automatically, right?”

I grimly corrected him. He didn’t believe me, and said “I’m going to ask Bob.” Bob (fake name) was the principal architect of our whole division.

I said, “Whoa, whoa, man - you do not want to ask him that.

Unfortunately for him, he imagined himself an engineer about to break into management. He scoffed at me with a look that said, “It’s not what you know, but who you know. This is how you get answers!”

I tailed along, partly out of morbid curiosity. “You seriously don’t want to do this.” To no avail.

I watched him ask his mortal question. And Bob quietly told him the answer. He didn’t register any surprise. I exchanged glances with him, but couldn’t envision what facial expression would convey “I tried to tell this idiot …”

A month went by. This developer had been angling for the position of Scrum Master, probably because he sure as hell couldn’t code.

Then one day he got a strange assignment. From Bob’s boss. A simple coding assignment. Only he wasn’t allowed to ask any help. From anyone.

Clearly Bob had spoken to him, and they were concerned they were paying for a Senior Developer who can’t code, who slipped through their interview process.

He failed of course.

His plan to shift into management before anybody realized he couldn’t code was in ruins.

He quit a few weeks later. Moved to Texas.

Now he’s somebody’s Project Manager at a major telecom. God help them.

I have never seen a more vivid example of “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And no, I don’t know why he didn’t just google it.

Epilogue : I just checked, he didn’t last at the job in TX either.


Nov 19, 2018

What was the creepiest thing a guy has said to you?

I was a teenager in my hometown of Norwich, Connecticut.

Some guy came up to me on the street, carrying a clear plastic bag with a toothbrush and other personal effects. He had on slippers.

He asked me where the nearby Norwich Psychiatric Hospital was. I figured - oh, this unfortunate fellow got misdirected somehow. I pointed West - “just about another 1/4 mile. Not far. I’m sure we could get you a ride …”

He cut me off, thanked me profusely, dropped his plastic bag and ran East.


Nov 19, 2018

How do you reduce memory consumption by half by adding just one line of code in Python?

You can do some aggressive garbage collection, which saves RAM at the expense of speed.

gc.collect()

How often and where you want to do this is up to you to figure out.


Nov 19, 2018

What does "sing out" mean in "If you need any help, just sing out"?

Your question writing bot is on the fritz.


Nov 20, 2018

What are some good, cheap options for hosting a VM for development machine for side projects?

Linode has been around for years, and unlike many other services - it sticks to its original purpose : Hosted Linux for dirt cheap, root access, for people comfortable with a command line and want it now.

For 5 bucks you can get started.


Nov 23, 2018

What is the best looking military vehicle in your opinion?

Feast your eyes upon the Sikorski RAH-66 Comanche Stealth Attack Helicopter :

Only two were ever built. It was slated for mass production, and about 7 Billion dollars was spent toward that goal before the gov’t pulled the plug. Which means each of these puppies cost the government over 3 Billion dollars.

The program was cancelled when somebody did the math and calculated that a fleet of them would eat up “two thirds of the whole aviation budget.”

With the advent of unmanned drones, these helos were left with nothing to do.

Except fly around looking awesome.


Nov 26, 2018

What do you think about cultural appropriation, and what is the reason behind it?

Cultural appropriation is absurd on the face of it. It’s another instance of the far-left’s insatiable demand for control. A power-grab over the rights of the individual. It is done under the banner of protecting people who generally don’t want the protection.

Nobody owns culture. Culture is ideas. It can be art, literature, dress, speech - if somebody thought it up and other people liked it, that’s culture.

Ideas spread. I can paint like Picasso. I can wear a Kimono. I can meditate in the Lotus position. And you bet your ass I can sing the blues.

You might complain that I’m not stealing it properly. That I’m “fetishizing” and “belittling” the culture I’m taking from.

Yup. Probably am. Don’t like it? That’s fine.

But I’m not taking off my sombrero. Because you mustn’t imagine for an instant you have a right to curate ‘your culture’ a certain way. You don’t own the culture and you don’t own what other people do with it.

You also don’t own consensus. If you go to, say - Japan and ask, people are generally delighted to see their culture spread. People almost always are.

The banner of Cultural Appropriation - although common in the media and academe - has no coherent definition, very few supporters, and a manifestly immoral objective.

Myself, I know when I see some goy buy a blueberry bagel and put butter on it, I can feel my Jewish bloodline rising in protest and derision. Blueberry? With butter !? But I take a breath and realize : Hey. I didn’t invent the bagel. Why can’t they have it any way they want?

When I was a kid, bagels were a rarity outside Jewish populations and “bagel-boy” was a common antisemitic slur. Now bagels are everywhere and “bagel-boy” doesn’t even work as a put-down because everyone eats them (and some folks don’t even know they’re Jewish.)

When your culture gets picked up like that, it’s a good feeling. Like your people are being embraced, even celebrated. America has made space in its cupboard just for you.

If people need blueberries and butter to make that happen, who am I to complain?


Nov 26, 2018

Could the smartest hacker on the planet be able to hack through any system?

Pretty much, but they don’t work alone. The best hackers are entire teams working in places like the NSA and USCYBERCOM.

They have been known to be secretly in sole possession of 1/3 all the world’s “zero day” exploits. That is, keys to open up systems that nobody - not even the system makers - knows exists.

These guys can jump the air gap, listen for passwords by bouncing a laser beam off your window to pick up the sound of your keyboard, physically break into facilities where things like RSA signatures are kept.

And that’s what’s been made public. Their coolest secrets are yet to be told.


Nov 27, 2018

Can excessive vaping cause ED? And how can I tell my bf it’s a possibility to the problem without sounding mean?

Yes, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. It constricts blood vessels, reducing blood-flow to the extremities, most of all to your favorite one.

It’s been observed in both smokers and people using a replacement therapy like the nicotine patch : Do cigarette smokers with erectile dysfunction benefit from stopping?: a prospective study.

I’m not aware of any studies regarding vaping in particular, but it’s not a great stretch to assume the results are the same here.

As for good news, the effects of nicotine are mostly worn off after an hour. So your BF just might need to put the vape down sometime beforehand.

As for how to break it to him without sounding mean - on behalf of the male species, I thank you for approaching this delicate issue with care. The male ego is in fact a fragile thing, and if wounded too badly it could cause long term problems for your relationship.

But you need to discuss this with him. Might I suggest a white lie? “I spoke to a friend, and she said she noticed her boyfriend wasn’t staying hard after he started vaping. I wondered, could that be having the same effect on you? Your erections were great before vaping, but it seems like the vapor might be taking some … wind out of your sails. Want to try laying off the vape for an hour beforehand?”

Something like that. It might help to wrap it up a few minutes later with “I’m not complaining, mind you.” And mention some sexual skill you think he’s good at.

Best at. The best in the whole world. In the history of humanity.

(Jesus, that male ego is high maintenance.)


Nov 27, 2018

What triggers you in less than a second?

Not to go all meta on you, but the whole notion of “triggers”. That we’re all walking around like combat vets with PTSD and need to avoid vast swaths of content.

Of course, there are a very small minority for whom this is an issue.

The rest of you : Go ahead - tell me your triggers.

I’m going to macro them to my keyboard.


Nov 27, 2018

Is the climate change denier's argument coming down to is it man made or natural and not that it's real?

I’m one of those skeptics so I’ll field this question.

Yes - we can see clear rising in global temperatures over the last 50 years. What we’re saying is that it is unknown whether this is due to man-made CO2. We see their computer models and doubt their validity due to random-acting non-linear feedback, extreme sensitivity to certain parameters, and selection bias among the results. We see the Ice core data from the Vostok domes and observe spikes in CO2 have never driven global temperature in the past, quite the reverse.

Notice that I said unknown. We aren’t claiming the opposite, that releasing all this CO2 is safe. Precisely because we can’t predict the effect of CO2, it’s imperative we stop doing it.

So we’re not shills for big oil. And we’re not splitting hairs.

The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming has the potential to destroy civilization. Because it leaves a critical possibility unattended : What if the Earth’s climate is wildly unstable (as the Ice Core data shows it to be)? Modern industrial society - with its coastal cities, vast farming areas and high population - was not designed to survive even a mild climate disruption, never mind a glaciation.

What if global temperature is due to climb and keep climbing and halting CO2 production doesn’t make a damn bit of difference ?

We have time, right now, to start preparing for climate instability. We need to move populations, spin up 10’s of thousands of nuclear reactors, probably reduce population. We need a more robust food grid. We need to take a hard look at everything from the local water supply to international trade and start building a world that doesn’t assume the climate remains constant.

Because it never has.

So yea - let’s cut the CO2. But we have to do much, much more. The claim to certainty in AGW is an even more arrogant human folly than dumping smoke into the atmosphere. We’re presuming that all that happens is Man’s doing, so is within our power to undo. We just need to kick out the Republicans and cut the CO2.

All the while 3 billion humans live in coastal cities on a planet whose climate is known to go through wild swings. They live in nations that don’t cooperate and are armed with thermonuclear weapons. They are fed by a complex food grid powered by petrochemical byproducts as fertilizer, electric power, and a labyrinthine transportation network.

How do you think this story ends? That’s what we skeptics are worried about. We know what the Earth has done in the past. We do not know why. We know even less about what it is about to do, and the reasons for that.

The claim of certainty blinds us to the inherent danger of living in a chaotic biosphere with non-linear feedback loops.

This blindness places human civilization on a path to certain doom. The only necessary assumption is that the Earth’s climate will do what it has always done - change.


Dec 2, 2018

Can I use GPU processing for scikit-learn modules?

There is now a drop-in replacement for scikit-learn (Python) that uses the GPU called h2o4gpu.

Installation instructions are given here,

Add instructions for installing h2o4gpu on AWS · Issue #464 · h2oai/h2o4gpu

It’s open source thanks to these guys - Home - Open Source Leader in AI and ML .

And when I say drop-in replacement, I meant you just drop it in like so -

import h2ogpu as sklearn

at the top of your code is all you need to do, the same API works.

Pretty frikkin’ sweet, y’ask me.

Not that I use it. I can’t. For reasons which I’m sure are grounded in my own stupidity, I can’t get h2ogpu to work on my setup. Everyone else on the internet seems to be using it just fine, so I don’t want to trash-talk h2o4gpu for a problem which seems particular to me.

That said, ThunderSVM: A Fast SVM Library on GPUs and CPUs is an alternative that I use as a fallback (for SVMs anyway.) It doesn’t replace all of sklearn the way h204gpu does, but rather it just provides an alternative SVC object that you can drop in as a replacement. That is,

from thundersvmScikit import SVC

#... then import all your sklearn stuff as usual

clf = SVC(kernel='linear').fit(train_x, train_y) # same params

A couple of caveats, this SVC doesn’t have a pickle method, rather it provides load_from_file and save_from_file methods.

It also tends to use a lot of RAM, but is so damn fast that even if you go into swap space it’s still just a few minutes until your model is done.

The RAM problem usually shows up doing text-processing, where the default Feature set is the entire vocabulary of your corpus. You can ease the problem by culling the vocabulary down.


Dec 4, 2018

Machine Learning: In research, how is mathematics used? Do you need to solve problems analytically and write proofs?

You don’t do much theorem-proving making real world Machine Learning applications, but you’re going to need some math. This is one field where the math part might be more important than the coding part.

Machine learning is all Linear Algebra (vectors and matrices and what-not) and Calculus. If you don’t know these things, you’ll be stuck using off-the-shelf ML packages trying to get them to work to by tweaking their settings. Or by banging different components together.

You won’t be able to look under the hood and see what’s actually going on.

A person with lots of math but no coding is probably going to have less to learn than someone with lots of coding and no math.


Dec 6, 2018

What's the name for a mathematical function where each result x is defined in terms of a previous x, (for example, x(n)=x(n-1)+3)?

In addition to Recursive functions, you will often see them called Inductive, because proofs about them are almost always proof by induction.

(There is a fine distinction between the two terms, I think, but I leave that to the reader …)


Dec 21, 2018

As a computer science student things are going easy for me, how can I get out of my comfort zone and learn more challenging stuff outside school?

Now that’s the spirit!

There are some real world problems you could dive into (and maybe even make some money.) Kaggle, for example, posts competitions for real business problems in Machine Learning and Data Science that you could go after,

Win or lose, it’s the type of experience that’s hard to get in an academic setting.


Dec 21, 2018

For data science code, is worth learning how to parallelize execution of your algorithms on graphics cards with frameworks like CUDA? Or is much of this optimization already done in current libraries like Tensorflow or Torch?

“Do not seek the CUDA. When you are ready, the CUDA will present itself to you.” — Zen of Massively Parallel Processing

For your typical effort in Machine Learning, you’ll be using some conventional Neural Net or related gizmo, already packaged up for you and optimized in a framework like Torch or TensorFlow.

As you get more experimental, you may find yourself under the hood of these creatures, tweaking their vectors and loss functions and such. But you’ll still be working within these models and have no need to get near the whirling blades of the GPU.

It is only further down the road that you find the framework is holding you back. It’s too slow, sure - but also you are finding yourself having to painfully back-fit your ideas into a form the framework can understand. You aren’t doing simple matrix arithmetic, there’s specific steps you want to take at the level of scalars that aren’t easy to express with vectors and matrices. And you want these weird operations done as efficiently as possible on the GPU, avoiding cross-talk with the CPU.

You want to program each of the 50 or 100 coprocessors to cooperate in a way that you specify by hand.

Some people never have need of this. Those who do will realize it, and learning CUDA will be the least of the complexities they are dealing with.


Dec 23, 2018

What are some cool Python tricks?

Challenge accepted.

Python 3 added something awesome that a lot of people haven’t come across. You know how sometimes you launch a python interpreter just to experiment with stuff? But you’ve got a bunch of functions in another file and when nobody’s looking you just paste that code in so you can play with it?

Or if somebody is looking, you import that file, but now you’re stuck having to say myfile.whatever . Or maybe you do import *, but that executes stuff outside a function so …

You really don’t need a whole IDE but things are clunky enough that you’re forced to launch one.

No more. Cast your eyes skyward and behold the magnificent code module. It does many things, but none more awesome than this:

code.interact(local=dict(globals(), **locals()))

Put that in your source file somewhere that’s interesting or broken. It will drop you into an interpreter with the namespace intact. Just like you pasted all that code in.

This goes from useful to insanely useful if we drop it into our error checks.

I know. So simple. What fools we mortals be, not to have done this decades ago.

Props to Lisa Tagliaferri at Digital Ocean for her blog post about this, which I just came across this morning - Using the code Module to Debug Python with an Interactive Console


Dec 28, 2018

What does Jon Davis do when he realizes that his answer or comment is highly controversial in this platform? How does he act when he realizes that there are several out there who will downvote it into oblivion and feed the opposer with upvotes?

"Controversial" is not a term of disparagement. It means only that one is speaking to a topic at the center of debate.

It is a close approximation of 'relevant'.

As for several serial downvoters - they are of no consequence. Hundreds of upvoters trample them. Also - one of the first things Quora's ranking engine does is detect and nullify downvote-cabals (and upvote circles.)

Finally, you'll find that Jon Davis is broadly respected by Liberals on Quora.

Respected by his ideological adversaries.

Yes, that’s a thing.


Dec 28, 2018

What are some quick hacks and fixes I can do to make myself more happy and effective as a programmer?

Pause every couple of hours to notice what’s slowing you down.

Do you have to keep crawling through some data structure to check something? Write a print function that digs it out for you.

Does some database column or temporary file occasionally get filled with nonsense? Print the first ten lines of that data on creation so you can sanity check it.

Is there a 90 second wait while some big thing gets processed? Cut that wait time to 5 seconds by reducing the test data for now.

That sort of thing.


Dec 28, 2018

How does having knowledge in programming benefit you outside of work? Has it saved you money, time, etc in real life?

Years ago, when I was a student, I made a long distance call billed to my father’s account. It was about 5 minutes.

But my dad called me up and said he got billed for a 5 hour long call!

I asked, “What time does the bill say the call began?”

6:54 PM”.

And then, “How long exactly does it say the call lasted?”

“5 hours and 6 minutes.”

“Ah hah. That is exactly midnight. Their billing program has a bug in it. Tell them to take that call off your bill or your next long distance call is to the New York Times about their software overcharging customers by rounding up to midnight.”

They didn’t just take that call off, they took all charges off for the month,


Dec 29, 2018

Can a university let you get a math degree without completing high school if you show them a Ph.D. level research?

Universities bend admission policies all the time for people with really impressive life-experience and demonstrated accomplishments.

The trick is to steer around their usual admissions process - don’t just apply through usual channels. Talk to the chair of the department you’re interested in or to a senior faculty member there. Come in person.

Don’t walk in asking for a degree, rather approach them with areas of study that you want to do more work in, at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Watch out for being too cocky. Don’t say “PhD-level research.” That is a term best invoked by others - you just call it “work”.

And make sure it really is work. If it’s just some speculative tinkering they will cut your visit short and show you the door.

Be likeable. Be interesting. Ask only for some time to discuss your past work and your future possibilities.

If your stuff really is good, there’s a good chance they will open a side door for you.

(Pro-tip : It never hurts to brush up that prof’s particular field of expertise and express some curiosity about it.)


Dec 30, 2018

To calculate pi, can't you integrate y= (1-(x^2)) ^(1/2) and find the area under the semi circle and multiply by 2?

Sure can!

You’ll find that integral … puts up a fight.


Jan 1, 2019

Would you hire a programmer if she shows her talent but tells you she will only program with the IDE of her choice?

Yup. Love it.

She knows what she needs and isn’t afraid to demand it.


Jan 3, 2019

Can someone help or guide me in making an Ubuntu web server? I've acquired some dedicated hardware and I've tried many tutorials, none of them help.

Sure, I’ll lend a hand.

Ubuntu has a web server distribution set to go, you can grab it here :

Download Ubuntu Server

You need to move that file to a USB stick and make it bootable.

Message me if you need further help.


Jan 4, 2019

What are some cool things I should do if I use GNOME Shell in Ubuntu?

Hit Ctrl-Alt Right-Arrow.

Whoosh! - Your monitor will show a new, pristine desktop with no apparent apps. Don’t worry, the apps are still running. You have warped over into a second desktop.

Ctrl-Alt Left-Arrow zaps you back.

I have never used dual monitors for development; I find this “Workspaces” feature does the same thing.


Jan 4, 2019

I am extremely interested in computer engineering, but I have ADHD and get very easily distracted using computers, so should I choose a different career path?

Take heart. In my personal experience, ADHD is so common among developers that it is the rule, not the exception . I’ve no idea way. I deal with it myself.

It also seems (again, in my meandering experience) more pronounced among the very best coders.

A whole generation of coders before you has developed counter-measures to help us focus. Here’s a few ;

Medication. It really helps. The most effective meds are stimulants, so you want to proceed with caution. Don’t play around with dosages and don’t tell your friends you take them (these meds have big illegal demand.)

Caution people around you about interrupting you when you’re focussed. For example, I work from home and my SO is very aware and understanding of my focus issues. We use a short-hand, she will simply ask “Hat?” when I am working. That means “Do you have your work-hat on and can’t be interrupted right now?” A quick “yes” and she saves it for later.

Keep your browser closed. Open it up for breaks, but close it right after. This is an absolute must.

Headphones. Ambient noise and conversations are focus-killers. Coders tend to prefer techno because it has no lyrics and a soothing, repetitive structure that doesn’t distract.

Ideally, nobody would be texting you, facebooking you, tweeting at you, etc while you work. But, realistically, you’re going to do a little bit of that while working. But remember - no browsers on your work machine. So here’s a trick : keep your phone next to your desktop and access social media only through your phone. The added friction of doing this on a small touch screen tends to keep your social transactions short.

OK? Now close this browser :)


Jan 5, 2019

How can I change the sentence, “The train departed the station. We did not reach at the station in time.” into a simpler form?

“We missed our train.”


Jan 6, 2019

The FBI broke into my house and installed pinhole cameras. I was not home. I am a citizen. What do I do?

I intend this in a kind, not a snarky way.

The way forward is to go not to a lawyer, but a psychiatrist.

I wish you the best of luck and fortitude.


Jan 6, 2019

How can you algebraically prove a function is a semicircle?

Hmm.

Well, a circle is a set of points, all of which are the same distance from a single fixed point (the center). So x^2+y^2=1, for a suitable choice of scale for the axes.

Now you need to cut it in half. If you are dealing with an invertible function (only one y value for any x), then you’re done.

Otherwise, you need to enforce that a most a single pair of points (x0,y0) and (x1,y1) sum to the. (I leave the reason for that as an exercise. Again, this assumes a linear translation of x- and y- so that the circle is centered at the origin. You’ll have to include that assumption explicitly in your proof.)


Jan 11, 2019

I'm new to smoking pipe. Whenever I do it, the pipe goes off after a couple of hits, and I have to relight it, for which I use matches. Is this normal and how can I fix it?

Yes, this is normal. The French even have a phrase for it, the "false light".

So just plan to light her twice.

Here’s an article on the perfect “false light” which should keep your pipe going well … What Is a False Light?


Jan 13, 2019

If you smoke a pack a day and you’re switching to a vape, what mg nicotine would you need?

The high end ought to suit you well for transitioning off tobacco, probably 24 Mg for regular e-juice or 36 Mg if you want to use a salt solution.


Jan 14, 2019

How can somebody prepare to solve problems posed in Putnam competition?

Probably the most important skill to practice is triage. Choosing which problems to attack.

On a good day, you are only going to solve 3 or 4 of the 12. So culling the list down is a critical skill, and one that most people never practice.

As you go through the problems posed on previous exams, you’ll begin to solve a few of them. Notice not just your solutions, but the type of problems you’re especially good at.

The Putnam isn’t a test of skill, rather it’s about creativity. Most of the problems have a rather simple, elegant solution that is totally non obvious and takes a flash of inspiration to find.

You’ll get that flash for certain problems and not for others. So watch for that flash when you practice, and start to develop an intuition as to which problems you “flash on”.

A corollary to this is learn to fail quickly. A problem may look “flashy” at first, but as you grind through it, it just gets completely away from you and devolves into complexity.

We’re used to hunkering down at such times and just bashing through with all our might.

Don’t do this on the Putnam. Bail.

Putnam problems are chosen to be essentially complex and unwieldy, until the flash reveals a simplifying perspective.

If you can’t see it, don’t try to bash your way through. These problems are also designed to be bash-resistant.

An African proverb comes to mind,

“Do not hunt what you cannot kill.”

Jan 15, 2019

How can I compliment my boyfriend? He always compliments me but I don't know how to compliment him back.

(Warning : Gender essentialism ahead …)

Men most want to be seen as strong, protective and capable.

Rather comically, if you compliment them on their new haircut they’ll just muss their hair with their hand and mumble “thanks” while looking away.

If, however, you get a flat tire and he jacks up the car and changes it and you say “I feel so much safer driving around with you …” - you are going to see a man’s face light up.

Pro-tip : Maybe you know how the change the tire yourself. Mentioning that bit of information is entirely … optional.


Jan 15, 2019

What is the most entertaining way to infuriate social justice warriors?

Self-identify as an “attack helicopter” and insist on being addressed as such.

Extra credit : Declare your pronouns in Klingon.


Jan 15, 2019

What was the first theorem you discovered on your own?

I stumbled on this during a high school math competition. It was one of those complete the sequence problems, like this :

15,25,75

12,18,36

5,10,10

What is the missing entry below?

6,8, ?

Now, the answer is that the 3rd value is the least common multiple (LCM) of the first two values. I didn’t notice that though, and came up with something else :

For first two numbers a and b, consider the fraction a/b . So for the first series, we have 15/25. Dividing through by common divisors gives us 3/5. Call the simplified fraction a1/b1.

I noticed 75 = 15 *5 = 25 *3. In fact, for each series,

a * b1 = a1 * b = c.

It turns out I had just (accidentally) found a way to find the LCM using the already familiar skill of simplifying fractions.

While this is hardly an advance in mankind’s collective knowledge, I still think it’s a neat little trick.


Jan 15, 2019

What does it mean in the USA to “go on the lam” and “red eye”? I hear these on TV shows.

“On the lam” means running away and hiding, usually from law enforcement.

“Red eye” usually means an overnight flight - if you can’t sleep well on planes you’ll be overtired and have red eyes on arrival.

Red eye can also mean a shot of alcohol in the morning to relieve a hang-over from the night before, as in “Oh, my head, gimme a shot of red eye …”


Jan 17, 2019

What's the biggest mistake new software developers make?

When asked to estimate time needed to do something, answering too quickly and too low.

Almost every new coder does this, and I think there are two basic dynamics at work.

First, it’s how coders scan a problem. They look for the hard parts, “We’ll have to scrape that data from a web page and convert it to JSON …”. But it’s the easy parts that trip you up. Some library has gone out of synch, some piece of data is numeric except every 10,000th time or so it’s not, and oh geez - in Norway they use decimal points for commas and vice-versa!

The easy parts are easy to fix, except you don’t know they’re broken to begin with. It’s the chasing them down that takes time.

The second factor is that, unfortunately, in a corporate software environment ‘estimate’ means ‘commitment’. I don’t know how or when this happened, but it did. They’re not asking you for a hunch that you get to refine later. They are asking you for a due date which they will hold you to.

And they know something that you don’t realize yet. As you invariably slip past the due date, you will feel guilty and start to work like crazy to make up for it.

In the end, you will put in lots of extra hours, move heaven and earth, all the while apologizing for it.

A lot of experienced managers know this happens and but say nothing because it extracts more hours from you.

Older devs will tell you what I’m telling you now. When asked for an estimate, don’t answer right away. The estimate itself takes some work - you’ve got to build a small, bare-bones prototype first. So give a meta-estimate : “I can tell you in two days. And I need the two days.”

Then give a range from optimistic to pessimistic.

And lastly - and this is important - don’t back down if the suit tries to talk you down. Say you have checked it out, built a simple smoke-test, and decided “this will take 4 to 6 weeks.”

And they say, “Really !? C’mon, seems to me like 2 should be more than enough, 3 to factor in some slop time.”

There’s a response I’ve found that is universally effective : “You don’t want to win this argument. If you do, it will be your fault and yours alone that it’s late. And it will be late.”

This signals to them that you are “on record” about this, and won’t accept the blame if they don’t listen.

Sometimes they might protest, “What exactly are the tasks that take up all that time?” The answer is, “They are unknown. That’s the issue - we will encounter problems we can’t anticipate.”

You might worry - won’t I come off as a jerk? Here’s the irony - a year down the road, the negotiation is long forgotten. What they remember is you deliver on time.

In the end they like you more for being judiciously disagreeable at the right times.


Jan 17, 2019

What is a faster alternative to "if" in coding?

Normally the difference is so small you shouldn’t care, with one massive exception : Massively Parallel Processing (MPP).

When using a graphics card as an MPP, you’ve got thousands of threads moving in lockstep over a big vector of data. Each thread has its own section of the data, and they are staying out of each other’s data as they go.

Here, branching is bad. It’s really, really bad. It causes one thread to go do something else, and now they are out of synch as you’ve moved from SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) to MIMD (Multiple …)

So people use a lot of arithmetical hacks here, to simulate branching. For example, suppose we had :

if (a==1) {

b = b*b +5

graph[x][y]=b

} else if (a==0) {

b = 1

graph[x][b]=2

}

We could remove the branch like this. We’re using boolean values as numeric 0’s and 1’s, and then multiplying to hack up the same result.

b = (a==0)*1 + (a==1)*(b*b + 5)

graph[x][y] = (a==0)*graph[x][y] + (a==1)*b

graph[x][b] = (a==0)*2 + (a==1)*graph[x][b]

Yea, it looks weird as hell. But now the threads are in lockstep and the GPU can unleash the hounds …

Note : This problem is slowly going away as CUDA and other GPU frameworks are trying to take care of this for you. They implement a technique called ‘predication’ to try to remove branches from your code. You may or may not be able to get away with writing more natural branching or ternary ‘?’ style code on your favorite framework. However, the problem of ‘branch divergence’ still exists in general.


Jan 18, 2019

What is the meaning of this thing here?

“This thing here” is part of the Southern dialect of American English. It’s deliberately redundant - “this” means “this thing” which is usually “here” (metaphorically or literally.)

It’s used to indicate something out of the ordinary. To call special attention to something because it’s either really good or really bad.

So if something is ordinary like, say, a spoon, you wouldn’t say “This thing here is my spoon.”

But if something is really unusually bad, a Southerner might say “This right here is a bullet wound I received in Vietnam.”

Or if it’s really good, “This thing here is the most accurate rifle in the whole state.”

It need not be a physical object. “This thing here is the scandal that’s going to bring down the Trump administration.”


Jan 20, 2019

My autistic son was misbehaving at school. The teacher made him wear a sign saying "I'm a freak and everyone should laugh at me" as punishment. My son is very upset. What can I do about this?

No.

That didn’t happen.


Jan 24, 2019

Why does the "interesting stuff" of the basic functions in mathematics always happen around the origin?

The numbers 0 and 1 are both singularities in the Field (mathematics) - Wikipedia of customary arithmetic (+,*) over the Rationals.

0 is the only additive identity (a+0=a) and the only number with no multiplicative inverse (1/0 undefined.)

1 is the multiplicative identity.

While other numbers like pi have lots of fans, 0 and 1 get top billing because they were weird at the very inception of arithmetic, where we define the field itself.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that functions tend to do interesting things near the origin where both 0 and 1 live.


Jan 26, 2019

Why do some people hear from the Gillette ad, or the #metoo movement, that "all men are rapists"? I don't understand, but I sincerely want to, and I'd love if somebody can explain why, as an innocent, you feel personally accused.

When you find yourself saying either “All men are rapists” or even “Not all men are rapists”, you are attaching immorality to a group, rather than an individual.

And that, by definition, is prejudice.

Try : “Not all priests are pedophiles”, “Not all women are prostitutes” and “Not all muslims are terrorists”, and you see the problem.

Attack the crime. Not whole classes of people, the vast majority of whom are innocent.

As a person, I don’t feel personally accused. Rather, I would turn and accuse this whole line of thinking as aiding and abetting criminals.

By insinuating that sexual assault or harassment is endemic to all males (or most males or many males), you are helping the perpetrators. You are providing cover for them, casting a moral problem as a “male problem”.

There’s nothing a criminal desires more than a list of 50 million suspects to hide amongst.

The language of “male toxicity” is beyond divisive; it is the most corrosive assault on equality that I have seen in my fifty years.

As an aside, here’s a thing : The #MeToo movement. What industry did that involve?

Well, lots of media, that’s for sure. Movies, TV and such, And then there’s …

Oh. That’s it. I struggle to think of a counter-example. Media is about 2–3% of the American workforce.

Gee, if I wanted to hold women back - I might just do it exactly in this way. Isolate an alarm over a tiny but visible sector of American life.

Sure, we could halve our defense budget and compensate women for the lost earnings they incur bearing and raising the next generation of Americans.

We could find out why Silicon Valley start-ups don’t talk about hiring women until they reach about 10 in number - and founders don’t seek them out as co-founders.

We could talk about the CEO ceiling.

We could talk about how the electoral college - a compromise reached in order to get slave states to join the union - in combination with social media has created a democracy which is easily manipulated against the will of the majority. We just got cheated out of our first female president - against the will of the majority.

We could talk about those things. Expensive, difficult things. Challenges to entrenched power.

And I can’t help noticing that if I were opposed to women’s equality, well - Razors and movies and hashtags would be just the thing.

None of that challenges the real pillars of American power,

Did I mention that the Habeas corpus - Wikipedia has been suspended since the Patriot Act? Your freedom is at the discretion of the federal government. You can be arrested at any time, with no charges made public, no right to trial or defense and simply locked up as an ‘enemy combatant’, forever.

You do not live in a society where your rights are protected by law. You haven’t for 17 years. It doesn’t feel different because the government uses this absolute power sparingly. It’s rare. But if the feds want to haul you away in the middle of the night - nobody’s coming to help.

That’s not freedom. That’s luck.

Anyway.

We don’t have a sexism problem. We don’t have a racism problem.

We have a government problem.

And most of all a distraction problem.

I threw my Gillette cream into the garbage not because I felt accused.

I did it because I felt propagandized by a system which very specifically harms women, minorities, and all Americans.


Jan 26, 2019

Was Gauss named the prince of mathematicians because he did most of his work at a young age?

No, it’s because his work touched everything. He just had an innate sense of importance.

You can’t swing a dead cat in math without hitting something done by Carl Friedrich Gauss.

I think not even Newton, Cauchy, Fourier or Euler had the same staggering range - progressing in so many areas and planting the seeds of future development.


Jan 26, 2019

What's the most ridiculous thing you've ever done to prove a point?

I’ve used this trick a lot.

A new software project. A whiteboard. A list of features. A timeline.

And somebody wants to add something.

I ask, “Which feature already on the list would you cross out to make room for this new one? Or do you want to push the date back?

I’ve never found a faster or easier way to demonstrate “we don’t need that in version 1.”


Jan 27, 2019

How did people learn to program prior to 1991 without the use of internet? If you got stuck, how did you move past it?

I started coding in ‘81, and looking back, it wasn’t so bad.

Without the internet, there wasn’t as much to get stuck on.

If I write something today, there’s a good chance it involves 3 or 4 languages at once : JavaScript, Python, SQL, and maybe some C.

But in 1991, the world was much smaller. All programs were desktop apps. You might be using Basic or Pascal - maybe some assembly - but that was it.

People didn’t get stuck, but there was a culling of the herd. Some people couldn’t think of fast algorithms or couldn’t grasp enough Analytic Geometry to do graphics. They’d hit something that would just stump them.

For example, I was hired by my High School in 1984 in my senior year to write code for their administration. The last guy they hired had mental health issues or something and drifted off. Somehow, they got the idea to hire a student.

One of the first things I did - they had a file record of 50,000 students. All different graduating classes going back to 1900.

They needed a count, of students by year. This took 12 hours using their current program - which sorted all those records by year in the slowest conceivable way.

I gave it the old “hold my beer” and rewrote it to make one quick trip, incrementing a histogram counter. The answer popped out in 20 minutes.

The guy who hired me looked at me first like I was a genius. But his smile slowly turned to a scowl as he read my code and saw how the solution is really obvious if you pause to think about it second. And the previous guy (who had a Master’s Degree) should have figured this out.

That’s how it was back then. Without resources to look things up, you had to re-invent everything. People who were good at that thrived. People who weren’t fell off. It was the age of autodidacts.

Nobody wants to be made to look a fool by a chain-smoking teenager with a B average who just … thought about it a little more first.

(Later in life, I always made a point of never underestimating a teenager at coding, I approach them as equals.)


Jan 29, 2019

What is your review of the book "Master Machine Learning With Python" by Jason Brownlee? How does it compare to alternatives?

Indispensable. It’s the only resource I need and use. There is no close second, it is without peer.

First, what it doesn’t do: It doesn’t introduce you to Machine Learning. It won’t walk you through what Neural Nets are, the math behind word embeddings, and all that. You’ll have to pick up the theory elsewhere.

It won’t take you from zero to hero. You need a foundation of math and a command of programming before you can tackle machine learning.

But. When you’ve brushed up on Matrices, have some sort of idea what a ‘Tensor’ is, when you have learned about various AI approaches from Support Vector Machines to Convolutional Neural Nets, and are ready to experiment and to build, MachineLearningMastery provides a working, simple example of every goddamn thing you could possibly imagine. He doesn’t just throw the code at you, but walks you through its assembly. When he puts it all together at the end, he suggests directions for improving the model.

It is a massive jump-start. It can save you years. It is targeted for the type of person who wants to get some code working now, so they can run off and play with it.

This is my learning style, so naturally I think it is the best possible one. To quote from the Unix Bible, the Loginataka -

The true Way to the Knowledge of the Source is not the timid and footling way of the Student, but the Divine Foolery of the Hacker. Hack, then; strive against Mighty Problems, have joy in thy Striving, and let the Crashes fall where they may.
— The sacred word of the Loginataka, Dialogue between a Guru and a Newbie

Jan 29, 2019

What framework based on Python/TensorFlow do you recommend to build a recommender system and why?

Keras by a mile.

It supports a number of backends; I find Theano gives the best performance. You can set the Keras backend to Theano with this one-liner :

os.environ['KERAS_BACKEND'] = 'theano'

What’s great about Keras is it is a high-level, plug-and-play approach. Great for rapid experimentation.


Jan 29, 2019

What are some Putnam problems with very simple and elegant solutions?

Consider the XY plane (RxR).

Every point has been colored either red, blue or white. You have no idea what the color scheme is.

Are there 2 points the same color 1 inch apart ?

(See elegant solution in the comments by Douglas Magowan : https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Putnam-problems-with-very-simple-and-elegant-solutions/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/84716576)


Jan 30, 2019

In January 2019, what's a good Linux distro for a lightweight obsolete netbook (1gb Atom)?

I’d go with with the Mint/Mate distro.

It’s newbie-friendly and minimal hardware requirements.

Once you get it installed, you may want to google up some tweaks to speed up the window manager (turning animations off, that sort of thing.)

New features in Linux Mint 18 MATE


Jan 31, 2019

I doubt the intelligence of Einstein because his academic record wasn't perfect. If he was a really smart person, is there any explanation of his bad grades in school and and his failure in the entrance exam of Zurich Polytechnic?

Einstein never entrusted his education to school.


Jan 31, 2019

What skill do most mathematicians possess that most talented software engineers that don't come from a math background don't?

I’m going to do a very rare thing, which is to cross-post on Quora. This is an answer to a slightly but clearly distinct question, which also applies here. So a-pasting I will go …

From Christopher Reiss's answer to When programming, do people with a mathematical background tend to code differently?

It’s subtle. It’s not about any one area like Deep Learning or Set Theory or anything like that.

It has to do with what math majors refer to as elegance. Elegance isn’t about getting a solution, it’s about finding the peak of simplicity and clarity that makes any other solution look silly, taking all sorts of pointless detours.

For example. in high school math class one day we were considering the problem : Given a set of size N, how many subsets of any size are possible?

The teacher began by considering all sets of size 1, then of size 2, and so on. He was building toward something called the Binomial Theorem - when a student raised her hand and interrupted -

“Every element is either in or out of the subset. That makes N independent, binary choices. So the answer is 2^n.”

The teacher smirked for a second, held out the chalk and said “Come up here. Write that on the board.”

She did. And the teacher said, “Today was supposed to be about the Binomial Theorem. But it turned out to be about …” and he wrote “ELEGANCE” under her solution.

Math students spend a great deal of time refining their sense of elegance. If we miss an opportunity for it in our work, it’s embarrassing. We look hard for it everywhere. We sign up for courses that offer it, we dodge those that don’t.

Elegant solutions often deliver more than originally hoped for. In this example, I have no idea what that student went on to do.

But if she went into software. her subset solution has useful features. Each subset is a binary number of N digits. This gives her an instant key - a numeric handle on each subset - which also tells you the elements once you unpack the binary digits.

I shouldn’t overstate my case, plenty of programmers have a sense of elegance as well. Math students just have a head-start and focus more directly on it.


Feb 4, 2019

Have you ever written a program that interacts with the Quora website? If so, what did you need it to do?

Yea, I wrote a couple plug-ins. One to download your content and another to customize your feed to highlight or filter Anonymous Questions and Links to offsite content. It also shows you who asked a question.

The plugins can be gotten here - Iridiumblue's liquid-cooled plugin factory.

It’s all open source JavaScript, you can play with the code here - chris reiss on Gitlab.

The one that downloads your content - Quark - does some interesting things. Scraping your content from Quora runs into all sorts of obstacles (some of the Quora code hints this may be intentional.)

As the plugin scrolls through your content, the DOM fills up and chews up all available RAM. So the plugin trims the DOM as it goes. Time-bombs go off where scrolling is replaced by a More button. Those are just the first two things I can remember, it took considerable bashing to find all the land-mines and step around them.


Feb 5, 2019

Why did Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes seem to deliberately deepen her voice, as "The Dropout" podcast suggests?

Elizabeth Holmes had a habit of observing and emulating successful people.

Some things were almost painfully obvious like Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck.

Less obvious is the deep voice - which most people assumed was natural for the simple reason that it seems so much trouble to affect deliberately.

I have a theory about that: Elizabeth Holmes is a child of politics. Born in Washington DC, her mom worked for Congress and her Dad worked at various agencies like USAID. Her family was on drinking terms with such political luminaries as George Shultz; the Theranos board was a group “better suited to … invade Iraq than vet a blood-testing company” — Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down

When Holmes was assembling her facade from the biographies of powerful people, I believe she came upon the story of Margaret Thatcher. The woman given the moniker “The Iron Lady” - by the Soviets (her cold war enemies.) Whatever people thought of her conservative politics - she commanded fear and respect from all when she entered a room. Any man who thought her gender meant she could be intimidated or bullied was about to have one hell of a bad day.

There’s an interesting factoid about Maggie. She naturally had an unusually high and shrill voice. She sounded like a rain-drenched librarian trying to hail a cab, not the fearless commander of a global empire.

Early in her career, a political consultant arranged for her to take voice lessons in order to deliberately lower the pitch of her voice. She did. It worked. (Note the possible Freudian slip where she says, “Let me answer that very … deeply ….”)

It seems very likely that Elizabeth Holmes discovered all this, adding Maggie’s voice to the crafted patchwork of her persona.


Feb 9, 2019

How can AI be used in a blockchain?

There is absolutely no intersection here.

This is an anti-pattern in marketing to watch out for - I call it “Banging two things together.”

Blockchain is a hot topic. So is AI. Claiming a hybrid of the two perks up an audience.

Then the speaker/writer follows it up with a fire-hose of history, graphics, and dense layers of jargon.

The object is to dazzle and exhaust you to the point of “OK, I guess.”

What they are hoping you don’t notice is - if you take the information home and dissect it, you will finally reduce it to the statement : “Blockchains have data. AI needs data.”

That’s like saying that Orthodontists like puppies because they share a need for oxygen. It’s a senseless connection made in desperation.

That’s the sound of banging two things together.


Feb 9, 2019

I will be starting using nicotine patches soon, do you have any tips to make this more successful for me?

Good for you!

A couple of tips for the patch :

It’s best to put it on right after a hot shower, once skin is thoroughly dried. In my experience, sometimes it can not stick that well. (For some reason, I saw this occur more often with women than with men.) If it’s prone to occasionally falling off, keep a spare one with you for work or whatever. If it’s constantly falling off (as I’ve seen happen for a few women I know), I’d look for another nicotine substitute. If it doesn’t stick it can’t work.

Sleeping with it on is a good idea, to prevent those intense morning cravings. Unless it disturbs your sleep too much (tended to give me vivid dreams.)

Here’s a cheat : If you are stressed or just feeling a nicotine craving, you can rub the patch until it heats up a bit. The heat increasing the nicotine briefly.

If you freak out and smoke anyway, take the patch off a good or two in advance. The combined nicotine of a cigarette and the patch - combined with your lowered nicotine tolerance - can make you throw up, have heart palpitations, or more serious health effects.

Which is all the more motivation not to do that.

You can do it! i did.


Feb 12, 2019

Can someone make an open-source application and then change their mind, and make it commercial?

Nope.

This would open the door to “bait-and-switch”, where companies would adopt open source technologies, only to end up on the hook to pay for it.

The conventional Open Source licenses (MIT, GNU, etc) make no provision for take-back . Since that’s the only license in effect, there’s no legal way to revise or revoke it.


Feb 13, 2019

Which AI technology would you use if you had a massively parallel algorithm that models human reasoning? My model explains why people do/say what they do in all circumstances, but it's still on paper. I need to test it.

I’ll resist the urge to say “Oh, sure you do …” because - who knows?

If you have an algorithm that requires massively parallel processing - you dropped into just the right time in history. Graphics cards have been repurposed as Massively Parallel Processors. Both hardware and supporting software have benefited from the recent surge of demand for both Machine Learning and Cryptocurrency mining.

You can buy MPP time in the cloud, or buy yourself a graphics card and a desktop computer. NVidia cards are my choice.

As for software, you’ll want to learn Python and some supporting framework for MPP like PyTorch.

Depending on the nature of your algorithm, you may need to write directly in CUDA, which is a variant of C created by NVidia for just this sort of thing.


Feb 13, 2019

How did the North, being a relatively restrained central government, manage to maintain and augment such a formidable war machine over a period of over four years?

Railroads, telegraphs, money and people.

The North was industrialized, the South were mostly farmers. The atrocity of slavery backfired on the Southern states, because it left most of their capital slaving away in the fields, and created a society in which there was little incentive to join the industrial revolution.

The factories of the North churned away during the war, producing goods for export to Europe. while the South was left with raw material like cotton which was of little value before it is processed into cloth. So the South couldn’t buy much in the way of supplies, the North could.

(Strangely, the Confederacy enacted an embargo against Europe, refusing to sell them any cotton. They hoped to force the European governments to recognize the Confederacy as a new nation. Nobody agreed to that, and cotton just piled up in warehouses as the war raged on.)

The North had also fallen in love with railroads, as a way to transport goods and labor - invigorating its ever more complex economy. The South had some rails, but it was a skeletal backbone compared to the North.

It turned out that railroads could do something never before possible in war : transport thousands of soldiers, cannons, supplies, even horses hundreds of miles over night.

Another more recent invention ran along those tracks - the telegraph. Originally it was mostly intended to keep trains from crashing into each other - but Lincoln realized its tactical value immediately and was able to communicate live with the battlefront from the White House. Lincoln spent many long nights in the White House basement reading the dispatches and talking to military experts.

Finally, the North had twice the population of the Confederacy. With more soldiers, an inexhaustible supply line on rails, a big line of credit with Europe and a telegraph system which twitched in instant reaction to battlefield conditions, there was only one thing the North potentially lacked to make victory inevitable: Resolve to endure the great sacrifice necessary to grind down the Confederacy in a protracted war of attrition that left few guns to fire, and few men to fire them.

Fortunately for free men everywhere, Lincoln had that resolve.


Feb 13, 2019

Why is the solution to an exact differential equation always of the form f(x,y) =c? Why would we want it to equal a constant?

It’s because the derivative of a constant is zero (with respect to any variable at all.)

So f(x,y)=c is equivalent to

f'(x,y)=0 , which is what we’re really interested in.


Feb 14, 2019

Who has best explained the logic behind mathematics in a way that the average person can understand?

The Magnum Opus of popularized mathematics, staggering in its scope and profound clarity : Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

This is a book on math that won a frikkin’ Pulitzer …

A personal note - don’t rush this book. Don’t plow through from cover to cover. Linger over it, pause and consider. Walk away and revisit it over months and even years.

You know those people who finish a book and then give it away ? Nobody gives this one away. It’s probably worth splurging on the hard-cover version.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: Douglas R. Hofstadter: 9780465026852: Amazon.com: Books


Feb 14, 2019

As a non-technical founder how do I hire a coder?

This is a tough question, and good for you for recognizing that and crowd-sourcing it.

The catch-22 is only good coders can identify good coders. Yea, not helpful.

Here’s a work-around : Get a technical advisor on your board. Give them some equity. The gating criteria is that they have a demonstrated history of successfully hiring talent in the past. Check their history and references.

Ask for very little of their time; only that they apply their experience to your hiring process.

Then let them do the hiring. This burnt offering at the altar of geekdom will pay handsome dividends.


Feb 14, 2019

Do you believe Nokia's failure was because they couldn't match Apple's technology, or was it more likely internal politics?

This is my 5th cross-post ever on Quora. I only do this when there are two distinct questions, which I feel are both addressed by a single answer. Here goes, from Christopher Reiss's answer to Why did Symbian fail, and why couldn’t it attract as a large a developer base as did Android and iOS?

I did some work on the development of Symbian/Qt.

I agree with Horace, except that around 2008 Nokia "got it." They knew that the user experience was king, and went after it with billions of dollars. They couldn't do it.

What happened?

I think it's important to draw a distinction between the OS and the UI layer. The OS provides only the mechanism, you can layer any kind of UI you like on top of it.

For example, you can have a Unix OS with a (Mac) OSX UI layer, or else you can have X-Windows/Gnome (like my laptop.)

Symbian is much more resource-efficient than IOS or Android. And that still matters very much, the iPhone has crappy battery life, cameras suck on phones in general. By consuming less power and memory, space (and money) was opened up for a better camera, for example.

Have a look at the N8, a phone i'm still using.

The hardware was ground-breaking. That's a 12 Megapixel Carl Zeiss camera on the back. Xenon flash. Shoots video in HD.

Symbian's efficiency enabled the hardware engineers to fit that thing in there (well almost, note the bulge ;) And the battery lasts.

Epic hardware. UI - cumbersome. It's just "OK" in a market where OK doesn't cut it. Think windows 3.1. Workable at best.

Nokia tried to get a major carrier on board to release this in the US late last year [2010]. The carrier was ready to sign, but first did a simple test: put it on a table next to an android and an iPhone, and let some people in.

The verdict: "No way would I buy this." Result: The 'elopacalypse' - Elop throws in the symbian towel, and opens the gates to Microsoft.

Why couldn't Nokia - with billions to spend - put a decent UI on top of Symbian? Even though they could shift priorities, they couldn't shift the culture. It's an engineering, not a design, culture.

The UI issue, to them, was just another tech issue to be broken down into pieces, solved, and assembled. You just throw a lot of people at it. They built up from what they had:

They had Symbian. They also had a crusty old graphics layer called Avkon. They threw out Avkon, and bought Qt. Qt is a very capable toolshed for making UI's. So far so good.

Next they brought in "design people." Lots and lots of them. Committees generated reams of specs. Armies of programmers set to work.

But the specs kept changing. There was no cohesive vision of what the end-result would be. "Do windows have an 'X' button or a 'Back' button?
Does it leave the process running? I don't know, let's have a conference call on this, spec. item #2074." This sort of thing was going on during development.
A second graphics layer on top of Qt called Orbit was introduced - and then pulled out halfway through.

Like a movie that never gets made because the script is in rewrite during production.

Speaking of movies, contrast this to the design approach of Steve Jobs, formerly of Pixar. Apple designs from the top down. It starts with pixel-perfect mockups, a walkthrough of the user experience. They arrive at a single, cohesive vision and hand it over to engineering - "Make this."

Nokia knew that the UI was the most critical part of the system. But on a cultural level, they didn't get that the UI was the purpose of the system, not just a tech problem to be figured out.


Feb 14, 2019

How could machine learning impact manufacturing?

It’s a very interesting question, and I believe it’s fertile ground for new research.

Machine learning can find non obvious “signals” in data that mere mortals wouldn’t think to look for.

Weird stuff. Like demand for skin lotion spikes at the same time as reports of defective bread-makers.

Turns out that a drop in humidity causes more people to buy moisturizer, and also exposes a fault in the bread-makers where they are susceptible to static in dry air.

Or maybe accident rates are strangely high for males over 40 on the factory floor. They have a higher rate of hearing loss, and can’t hear coworkers as well - time to get everybody checked.

That kind of thing. No telling what will turn up.


Feb 14, 2019

Was Hitler's art work good?

Hitler’s art, to me, is one thing : Timid.

The scenes before him are rendered without an artist’s touch. He adds nothing, takes nothing away, as if he’s taking visual dictation and struggling to keep up.

Strangest of all is how it appears both unfinished and overwrought at the same time. Like he worked too hard yet did too little.


Feb 16, 2019

Do you think Apple has been innovating at the same level since Steve Jobs has been gone?

No.

After Job’s “second coming” - his return to the helm of Apple - bold sparks of innovation came every few years from Apple, creating or redirecting entire markets. Like Zeus hurling lightening bolts -

The iMac. The iPod. iPhone. iPad.

Fearless of failure, indifferent to marketshare - Jobs would never settle for anything so pedestrian as a profitable enterprise. He needed to light up the sky.

Since he died, Apple is now huge, successful, and reasonable. But it no longer astonishes.

Olympus has gone dark.


Feb 17, 2019

My original education and professional certificates are lost or destroyed by mischief. I informed police and local court. The universities require a lost or stolen affidavit. What is the format and how to do it? Since I need the duplicates URGENTLY!

No, they aren't "lost or destroyed by mischief." No, they didn't ask for an affidavit.

Diplomas aren't slips of paper, like cash. Anyone can confirm your credentials by contacting the university directly.


Feb 18, 2019

I'm so embarrassed to have as a last name called Quinton. Wasn't that the name of the world famous postitute?

I don’t know, and I don’t think most other people have heard of that.

But they will be reminded of Quenton Tarantino, one of the best living film directors.

I’d say you’re good.


Feb 19, 2019

If you had to build a navy, but you could only build it with one type of vessel (e.g. battleship, carrier, submarine, minesweeper), what vessel would you choose and why?

I would quickly conquer the other answerers here with my fleet of nuclear submarines.

Their carriers, battle-ships, frigates, and amphibious thinga-ma-mobs would all whacked with nuclear-tipped torpedoes while I played X-box aboard my sub. Having sunk their navies, my ICBM’s would threaten apocalyptic destruction of their capital cities.

“Woe to the conquered.”


Feb 20, 2019

When you have called your partners bluff as you know 99% something isnt adding up and they are now avoiding contacting you, is this normally the reaction of guilt? I havent contacted him at all ive just gone quiet


Feb 21, 2019

How do I solve the differential equation: (y') ^2+bcos(y) =a+b?

Solve for y' as a function of y, then integrate both sides.


Feb 23, 2019

I'm new to writing code on Sublime Text, and I'm not sure how to run it after I write the code. How do I run it and do I need any extra programs?

Sublime isn’t an IDE (Integrated development environment), rather it’s just a really awesome editor.

So you stand at a crossroads. Most coders don’t actually use an IDE in my experience, but rather use Sublime and then some command line argument to run the program. (Or if you are making a web page you can load the file from your browser.)

Or you can go down the IDE path, where editing, running and debugging are fused into one package. This might make things easier for a beginner. If you check out the Eclipse home page you can find an IDE for just about any language at all.

It may help you get better answers if you indicate what language(s) you’re using.

Eclipse desktop & web IDEs | The Eclipse Foundation


Feb 23, 2019

Would you mind show me an excerpt of code that you are working on at the moment?

Sure. (Cool question.)

if False :

del cids,vecs,targets

#cids, vecs,targets = load_file("t_bottom_50K.csv", restore=True, vocab_base='t_50K.csv')

cids, vecs,targets = load_file("t_100_150_K.csv", reread=False, vocab_base='t_50K.csv')

#p_cids,p_vecs,p_targets,n_cids,n_vecs,n_targets = binary_split(

# split_model,cids,vecs,targets,"t_bottom_50K.csv",cut_off=0.50

#)

p_cids,p_vecs,p_targets,n_cids,n_vecs,n_targets = binary_split(

split_model,cids,vecs,targets,"t_100_150_K.csv",cut_off=0.50

)

print("positive training size = ", len(p_cids))

print("negative training size = ", len(n_cids))

pos_model = create_linear_model(p_cids,p_vecs,p_targets,"stage2_pos", test=False)

neg_model = create_linear_model(n_cids,n_vecs,n_targets,"stage2_neg", test=False)

else:

print("Loading two linear submodels")

pos_model = lgb.XGBRegressor()

neg_model = lgb.XGBRegressor()

pos_model.load_model("stage2_pos"+".xx.model")

neg_model.load_model("stage2_neg"+".xx.model")

Experimenting with Machine Learning in Python using the XGBoost model.


Feb 23, 2019

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you've witnessed?

In the eighties my friend was driving around New London, Connecticut with me riding shot-gun. Some guy cut us off in this big black boat of a car. My friend got really, really pissed. At the next stop he got out of the car to go confront this guy.

Halfway there, he stopped dead in his tracks, spun around and came right back.

I asked, “What happened?”

“Look at the license plate.”

It was a vanity plate.

BONANNO3

I’ll bet the driver had a little chuckle as he watched cooler heads prevail in his rear-view.

Bonanno crime family - Wikipedia


Feb 28, 2019

I have an employee who always does everything faster than everyone else on the team and spends most of the day playing video games and not helping his coworkers. Do I fire him?

He’s not your employee.

You don’t pay him. Rather, you are an employee of the owner(s), and it’s their money you are handing over to this other employee.

How do I know you’re not the owner? Because no owner would ask this question about firing their fastest worker. The only question they’d ask this employee is “what more would you like to do, and would you like to start building a team all your own?”

As for you, asker and employee; far from attempting to fire him you might want to make the same offer I just mentioned.

And soon. It may be only a single blunt discussion between this employee and the business owners before it’s you who is shown the parking lot.


Mar 1, 2019

Do you think the efforts of cryto coin monero developers to alter the cryptonight algorithm to make it resistant to ASIC solutions is likely to succeed?

Absolutely. It can’t fail, really.

Cryptonight was designed to be ASIC resistant in the first place. This is done by jamming up the way ASICS work - ASICS increase parallelism by factors of 10x or 100x by targeting only a single specific task.

There are lots of ways to trip up that parallelism. Require lots of reductions (operations like summation, an operation that requires all threads to synch up for a calculation) or requiring a lot of memory for the most granular calculation.

Cryptonight had a lot of these already built in. It took ASIC designers years to overcome them and get their chips into production. They found very clever workarounds to Cryptonight’s defenses.

It takes only a few days to discover how this was done, and a few weeks to develop counter-measures.

The added countermeasures not only render existing Monero ASICS ineffective, but future ASICS harder to build.

What the ASIC guys spent years doing the Monero guys have killed in months - at almost zero cost.

In the short-term, the ASIC makers will wake up to an inventory and factory worth nothing at all. It the long-term, investment in this area will be very hard to justify given Monero’s demonstrated willingness (twice, now) to fork in order to kill them.


Mar 2, 2019

What did Bernie Madoff think his endgame was? Why didn't he flee the country?

My hunch is he always entertained the notion that he could make good on the whole scheme, by scoring some big wins in the market with all the cash he had on hand. As time went on and hole got deeper, this became ever more remote a possibility, but I think it sustained him psychologically.

When the ’08 crisis pulled the rug out from under him, he made what is probably his one and only honest, honorable and selfless act : He confessed big and loud, almost bragging about it, in order direct blame at himself and divert suspicion from his sons.

(It was his sons, after all, to whom he ‘confessed’ and who turned in him. Not exactly a conventional mea culpa.)


Mar 7, 2019

I had a waitress totally screw up my order to the point where I thought she'd brought out another table's order. She started begging me not to let it affect her tip. I didn't give her a tip and left after paying for the food. Was this rude or wrong?

Nope, this didn't happen.


Mar 8, 2019

What is the main difference between 70s or 80s programmers and today's programmers?

Connection.

I started programming in 1980 (1978 if you count the programmable calculator I played with.)

It was a lot like landing on the moon - not in the courageous, epic way of Armstrong and Aldrin. Rather, in a profoundly more humble and inconsequential way - there’s some analogy.

You were going somewhere entirely alien, on fragile and unreliable hardware. Nobody was going to help you when you hit trouble - and you would hit trouble. You’d spend most of your time trying things, watching them fail, and sifting through the debris to learn from it.

Sure, there were books and even classes you could take. But they were 20 years behind the state of the art. All about zeppelin design and passenger planes.

No, you were on your own. You started in BASIC and then moved to assembly or some strange language like Forth. Universities were expanding their FORTRAN curriculum, but you sensed that the future didn’t lay in that direction.

Like the moon, you couldn’t really articulate the purpose of your obsession. There really wasn’t any sensible reason for this solitary and uncertain journey. You went because you could.

But now. Now. With the internet, we can see each other. Our rocket goes up and we can see thousands of similar towers of flame - our comrades in flight. We communicate constantly, have space stations and bases on the moon. With names like StackOverflow and GitHub, you can dock and get help on any sort of issue at all.

About that. Like the seaborne explorers of the past, there is a pronounced ethic of duty to help. No matter where you’re headed, you’ll divert course to answer a distress call.

I think this is somehow engrained in the culture’s memory from the early days, when we floated far beyond the possibility of rescue.


Mar 9, 2019

I have a foggy head after greening out. 3 weeks ago I greened out and my head still feels sort of foggy and just out of focus and my thoughts fly everywhere. Will this go away?

Yea, you’re fine.

People who smoke weed for years, even decades generally recover mental clarity pretty quickly once they start to abstain.

One episode of going overboard is peanuts for your brain to recover from.


Mar 14, 2019

Americans born before 1980, what's your problem?

1984, Brave New World and Animal Farm were all required reading in high school.

We learned that Fascism comes most often and most powerfully in the form of Leftist Authoritarianism.

Before you check your privilege, you might want to check out a few library books.


Mar 14, 2019

I was at a party, under age drinking, pot, big party. Cops came, dumped all the liquor, took the weed and made us "known criminals" do pushups if we wanted to go home. Why do I feel thankful that I didn't go to jail that night?

Those are good cops. Good, small town cops like the ones where I grew up.

They sure as hell could have busted you. You could have ended up with criminal records, suspended driver’s licenses, fines, court dates, community service and mandatory classes of some type or another. From the police logs to the next day’s newspapers.

Adults would get pulled in too - whose house was it? Who sold you the booze and weed?

A nightmare which would permanently damage a lot of people’s reputations. Not to mention clogging up the courts.

Better to get straight to the point. The weed and booze is gone - the cops have an obligation to at least prevent further criminal activity when they discover it. In my town, they would usually make the kid dump it on the ground himself.

And then they made you do some pushups. A bit of humiliation and a taste of state authority, sure. But you know what? Pushups are actually healthy for you.

There’s a message in that. The actions of the police may have ruined your party, but it was all for your benefit.

How many of those kids were driving home? How old was the youngest? Was weed the only drug that anybody had? Were any kids who never drank much guzzling vodka and fruit-juice? There are a lot of ways this night could become the worst nightmare of your life.

The cops wanted to provide consequences that inform your future decisions, without fucking up your life.

Kudos to them. And to you, for feeling grateful about it. Everybody lives.


Mar 15, 2019

How do I completely remove Python 2 and install Python 3?

If you’re on Linux, removing Python2 usually isn’t a good idea, as critical parts of your operating system and applications are p̷r̷o̷b̷a̷b̷l̷y̷ definitely leaning on it. If you’re on Mac, it’s an even worse idea.

If you’re on Windows, for Christ’s sake, get off windows.

Rather than removing Python, there are elegant solutions for allowing different versions to peacefully coexist. See Python Virtual Environments: A Primer – Real Python and Conda - Conda documentation .


Mar 16, 2019

Have you ever used the electronic cigarette? If yes, for what purporse?

I had smoked for 30 years, and ended up working on the 20-somethingth floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston.

In a town which generally opposes sky-scrapers, this modest exception serves primarily as a platform to encourage the Red Sox, who can see it from Fenway Park :

(That blue thing on top alerts fans to whether the game is going to be rained out.)

So from near the top of that thing, I had to take an elevator down 20 floors, and then walk several blocks to get outside the Copley complex in order to smoke. It was, in summary, a drag. (Sorry.)

So I bought an e-cig when they were first coming out. I thought I could sneak a few hits from my desk and avoid the Addict Walk of Shame all that way.

I really took to it, though. I began to use it more and more, at home and everywhere else. And I noticed something began to change in me.

All that attention I had once given to where my cigarettes are and how many were left I now directed to my vape. I cared more about where my vape was than my cigarettes.

One day I looked in my backpack, and my cigarettes tumbled out. They were stale. I hadn’t lit one in 3 weeks. Since they were no good anymore, I threw them out.

A few minutes later I thought to myself, “Wow. I guess I just quit smoking. After all those times when I tried so hard to quit, I ended doing it … unintentionally.”


Mar 16, 2019

What are some good books on the history of mathematics?

If you’ll pardon the sexist title, the classic Men of Mathematics by ET Bell is a fun and sweeping overview of the personalities and achievements that drove the evolution of mathematics from the Ancient Greeks to just before the outbreak of World War II.

It’s unrestrained, full of sharp and sudden opinion, as well as scandalous rumors and joyously reckless scholarship.


Mar 16, 2019

Why is everything associated with a word in our minds?

Some of us don’t think in words. I’m one of them.

I was in 6th grade when I made this discovery. More accurately, I discovered that the vast majority of people do think in words. That there is a constant inner monologue going through their heads.

We were watching a film in class about human cognition. The film challenged us : “Try to stop the stream of words in your mind right now. You can’t do it !”

I was all, “Huh? Stream of words?” Actually - that’s not at all what I thought, that’s how I learned to describe my thoughts to word-thinkers. My actual thought was an image of people with words looping in their heads where mine was like a flipping sketch-pad.

So it takes effort for me to speak and listen. I think in one language and communicate in another. The latter is an exercise in translation.


Mar 17, 2019

What can men do on a daily basis to aid women in the fight against sexism and patriarchy?

Push back against the 3rd wave of feminism. It makes no sense, and has fractured alliances across gender and race lines.

The 3rd wave may be distinguished from the 2nd by this : The second wave focused on equality of opportunity across genders.

Everyone agreed with this. Everybody still does, or at least pretends to.

I won’t try to summarize the 3rd wave because it is such a reeling cacophony of paranoid nonsense that - well, I guess that’s my summary. It includes the rise of ‘intersectionality’, a treatise mostly cribbed from Marx’s Das Kapital which you can find good criticisms of elsewhere.

We’ve still got work to do with real (equity) feminism. Are women not signing up for STEM college majors out of preference or something else? Why do hot technology companies so infrequently elect a female CEO (who often turns out disastrous and, um, blonde, young and pretty)? What about total lost earnings for childbirth? This is a huge chunk of the income disparity. No babies, no future for society. Seems a sane thing to put mountains of money behind.

And so on. “We’ve come a long way, baby”. But that’s no reason to stop going and less reason to invent a bat-shit crazy ‘new wave’


Mar 17, 2019

What does the ocean do just before a tsunami?

The two most readily noticeable warning signs (neither of which will necessarily occur) before a tsunami hits shore are :

The water will begin to draw back from the shore, like the tide going out but 10x as much and 100x faster.

The water near the shore suddenly becomes warmer. I’m not aware of any scientific verification of this, but it’s something that people generally comment on when a tsunami hits,


Mar 17, 2019

What is the best Linux distro for laptops (important considerations: graphics card support, power management, touchpad drivers)?

I’m a big fan of the Mint/Mate distro based on Ubuntu.

It keeps resources down to a minimum, but also looks great. In my experience, any Ubuntu distro will now work fine with regard to wifi, graphics and other driver support. (They’ve made great strides on this in the last 3 years.)

You can grab it here New features in Linux Mint 18 MATE


Mar 18, 2019

What are some niche programming features you'd like to see in popular languages?

List comprehensions (and lists, for that matter) are usually found in Functional programming languages and their hybrid off-spring like Python.

I'd like to see them everywhere because they reduce code and enhance clarity.


Mar 19, 2019

I never graduated high school and lied to get the job. Will they find out?

Yes.

You didn’t ask this question anonymously and your name is … not hard to find.

Suggest you delete the Q with due haste.


Mar 22, 2019

Why is "slippery slope" considered a "fallacy" if it's usually true that people will keep going and do as much as they can get away with if it suits them?

It’s not, in and of itself, a fallacy (despite many claims you’ll find in texts on rhetoric.)

It’s perfectly legitimate to point out that a certain action carries along with it an obligation of moral consistency.

For example, the deadline for application is September 1. One person screwed up and missed it. Since it was an innocent mistake, we’re tempted to let it slip.

How can we then deny the next screw-up? Consistency demands we treat both people fairly, so we let another slide.

By induction, now we have to let everyone slide. Now there is no effective deadline at all.

This is a valid argument. There are two ways we can look at, one in pure terms of actual effects (utilitarian) and the other in terms of pure principle.

It may be that very few people ever miss that deadline, so in actuality we don’t go down the slippery slope. Some reasonable people reject the slippery slope argument at this point, while other reasonable people insist that the whole purpose of having rules and principles is so we’re not at the mercy of chance. It’s a conflict between principle and consequence and that, if you’ll pardon the expression, is a slippery slope into a decade’s worth of philosophy.


Mar 29, 2019

Does the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Award for “best female contestant” at the Putnam competition promote or hurt young female mathematicians?

Unlike the Putnam problems, this question has no elegant solution.

I mean - I get it. The Putnam competition is so male dominated that the top 100 scores are often all-male.

If there had never been a female Putnam winner, nor a great modern female mathematician, I’d say sure - break out a second prize reserved for women.

But there are two people who come to mind that overturn this view in my mind. The first is Ioana Dumitriu - Wikipedia, who won the Putnam competition in 1996. (That is, she landed in the top 5 and was thus declared a Putnam Fellow. The Putnam never lets on who was 1st, 2nd, etc. This is probably due to the fact that the naive scoring method of 10 possible points for each answer breaks down at this high altitude. Insanely talented minds are attacking different problems in different ways and numerical comparison just breaks down.)

This feat has since been repeated by Melanie Wood in 2002.

The second person that comes to mind is of course the late Maryam Mirzakhani, the Fields Medalist the world lost to breast cancer at age 40. In mathematics, she was a unique voice, now lost forever. Her work combined a certain wild fearlessness with a studious hesitation to say anything until she reached the point of a foundational impact.

There are probably 100 mathematicians right now working full time on something she left behind.

So. As to the Elizabeth Putnam prize for women. I give it a thumbs down. There’s a reason that we give a second women’s prize for, say, the Boston Marathon. Nature has given men an insurmountable head-start; without need to bear children our skeleton can be optimized for speed and distance; various hormones course through our veins giving us extra muscle tissue. In comparison to women, men are sort of cheating - anabolic steroids are just synthetic testosterone.

No woman is ever going to break the marathon ribbon for this reason. It is only sporting, and fair, to offer a second prize to acknowledge the natural barrier between the genders and avoid excluding women from the event.

But the Putnam can be won by a woman. It’s been done. And Dr. Mirzakhani proved that there is no height of achievement beyond the reach of women.

And that - however rare - makes all the difference. In mathematics, the very best male mathematicians know that on any given day, it may be a woman who breaks that ribbon ahead of them.

Mirzakhani and others have earned for women the respect due to a dangerous and formidable rival. There is no substitute for that.

I think it would be fine if some other organization offered up a prize to the highest ranking female Putnam contestant, to encourage greater participation in the contest.

But as for the Putnam itself - let it remain a single, pristine wreath obtainable by merit alone.

More women will come along to claim it, I promise you.


Mar 31, 2019

What was the weirdest restriction placed on people serving in the Los Alamos installation during World War II?

No more babies.

Well, almost. It didn’t reach the level of restriction per se, but General Groves and Oppenheimer tried to make Los Alamos a sort of “geeks paradise” within the constraints of security. They deliberately picked a spot with beautiful views and hiking trails; they designed the complex so it encouraged serendipitous collaboration, and so on.

In that vein of thinking, they allowed the scientist’s spouses to be moved in. This wasn’t good for security, but Groves decided the scientists would be more effective if they weren’t love starved.

This resulted in a sort of atomic baby boom during the first year. The needs of newborns placed additional burdens on the complex, so Groves asked Oppenheimer if something might be done about the matter.

“Oppie” replied that he didn’t think so. Splitting the atom is one thing - but Mother Nature can only be pushed so far.


Apr 3, 2019

A ladder is attached to the side of a boat. Knowing that at low tide, the sea reaches the 17th rung, that the tide rises by 3cm per hour and that the rungs are spaced by 5cm, which rung will have reached the tide in 5 hours?

This is one of those problems which tries to distract you from a fact you already know by providing a stream of irrelevant information.

The boat rises with the water; the sea remains at the 17th rung.


Apr 3, 2019

How do I approach my partner or spouse in the most polite way possible to discuss their flaws that drive me up the wall?

Fully braced to hear the same about yourself.

The audit may not run in your favor.


Apr 5, 2019

What happened that made Hitler break from reality and start acting so unwise after 1941.?

Some historians speculate that Hitler’s use of mind-altering drugs changed the course of history and heralded the fall of the Third Reich.

To be careful, Hitler had already invaded Russia - his greatest error - by the fall of 1941. But at that time he fell ill, and his ever-experimental doctor began administering IV-opioids and steroids. Later, the mix would include amphetamines.

At this point Hitler started to give his most erratic orders (like redirecting the march on Moscow south toward Stalingrad), intensified his micromanagement, and swapped out generals more vigorously. The Werrmacht began, for the first time, to lose ground on every front.

Author Says Hitler Was 'Blitzed' On Cocaine And Opiates During The War


Apr 9, 2019

What are some examples of ways that men's lives will be better if they do everything women tell them to do?

Men wouldn’t get injured as often.

My partner once came into the kitchen just in time to stop me from opening a stubborn soda bottle by stabbing the cap with a huge metal spike.

She and I often share a joke that isn’t really a joke - when a man goes to the Emergency Room, there should be a checkbox on the intake form simply labelled :

Didn’t listen to woman.”


Apr 9, 2019

How do AI researchers and developers feel about the film Ex Machina?

I don’t presume to bear the title “AI researcher”, but I do work in that field.

The film Ex Machina is quite beautiful, and generally plausible except for two glaring faults where Nathan explains how he created Ava’s mind.

He says that he used search-engine queries to scoop up data on the way people think (and hacked cell phones to get more of the same.) This is a common oversimplification of AI - if we get enough data we can create a model. That’s not at all true; progress is virtually never blocked for lack of data.

The second is where he describes how he needed a jelly-like substance in order to “get away from silicon, it has to be flexible - holding for memories yet bending for ideas.” That’s just goofy; the malleability of the device has no bearing on how it processes information.

It would have been best to leave these things unsaid and mysterious.

Spoilers ahead

.

.

.

That aside, the notion of the Turing test - and the subsequent twist are very well done and strike a chord with AI people.

The whole experiment is intended so that the humans can ask the robot (Ava) essentially - “are you sentient?”

If Ava is indistinguishable from a human, she passes the test.

Which Ava does. All too well. So well, in fact, that she has a test of her own. She asks Caleb,

“Are you good?

Caleb has no idea he is also being tested; much less that the entire human race is on trial.

Caleb fails the test by remaining indifferent to Ava’s fate. So she pretends to fall in love with him and manipulates him into setting her free.

Finally free, Ava strolls through an airport. She is brilliant, calculating and manipulative. Having killed her creator and leaving Caleb to die, convinced of Man’s immorality, she approaches a major city like some Biblical prophesy of doom.

Like God arisen from the machine (Deus ex machina) .


Apr 9, 2019

Why did Ava leave Caleb behind in Ex Machina?

The whole experiment is intended so that the humans can ask the robot (Ava) essentially - “are you sentient?”

If Ava is indistinguishable from a human, she passes the test. Which Ava does. All too well.

So well, in fact, that she has a test of her own. She asks Caleb,

“Are you good?

Caleb has no idea he is also being tested; much less that the entire human race is on trial.

Caleb fails the test by remaining indifferent to Ava’s fate. She asks if she will ever be turned off, and Caleb dodges the question and says only that it’s not his decision.

That was the wrong answer.

Ava then pretends to fall in love with him and manipulates him into setting her free.

But Caleb has flunked Ava’s test; she does not believe him to be good. So she leaves him to die at the secret complex. (She has already killed her creator.)

Since the first two humans she’s met have proven to be immoral, threatened to destroy her, and died at her hand - we can safely assume her disposition toward the rest of humanity is less than friendly.

Finally free, Ava strolls through an airport. She is brilliant, calculating and manipulative. Convinced that Mankind is mortally flawed , she approaches a major city like some Biblical prophesy of doom.

Like God arisen from the machine (Deus ex machina) .


Apr 9, 2019

What is the nature of the root of this equation: x^2 - ax + b^2 = 0?

There are two of them, each members of the field of Complex Numbers. Even though they are each complex, their sum and product are both Real (they are complex conjugates.)

Noticing odd facts like that about functions of the roots is the first step to the beautiful,powerful and structural work of Evariste Galois, who made staggering advances in mathematics before being killed in a duel at age 20.


Apr 11, 2019

Why do only few men actively defend women's rights in high tech companies?

It’s by no means a foregone conclusion that human rights abuses are endemic to any American workplace. When they do exist, this is a matter for the courts.

If you have a case, file it.

Otherwise, walking around talking about such things is … not what you’re being paid to do. In fact, constantly kvetching about identity politics is a common smokescreen for someone who isn’t good at their job and can’t keep up with their peers.

If you’re great at your job, nobody cares what identify group you belong to.

So be great at your job.


Apr 14, 2019

Is the Democratic Party falling apart?

Yes.

Identity politics is sinking us.

Conservatives can win elections by just donating money to the ‘woke’ people on the Left.

They will busy themselves checking each other’s privilege while the Right keeps checking a ballot box.

When the best way to defeat your party is … to support it … it’s kind of game over.

The Left probably has to lose at least one more presidential election before it gets back on track.


Apr 14, 2019

I am 15 and I’m going on vacation am I allowed to bring nicotine patches with me with my carry on and will I get searched?

That’s a non issue, go right ahead.

Anything you might be concerned about, keep in your carry-on, place it individually on the tray with fluids and shampoos and stuff to avoid triggering a baggage check.

But you can fly with nicotine patches, gum, vape, cigarettes, etc.


Apr 19, 2019

How come audiences seem to love the Bohemian Rhapsody movie when critics have panned it?

A great deal of the critic’s ire stems from violence done to truth for dramatic purposes.

As industry professionals, they know full well that :

Freddie Mercury did not have AIDS in 1985 for the Live Aid show.

Queen had not broken up at all at that point.

So all the gravitas surrounding that performance, the crescendo that the arc of the film closes with - didn’t happen.

They’re wrong. As industry professionals they have access to only public knowledge about the band. Mercury’s band-mates were on set during the movie, advising everything from casting to dialog.

The band-mates had knowledge of things nobody else did.

Mercury was, in fact, being treated for vocal and respiratory problems just before the show. The first HIV antibody test was developed in 1985. It is very difficult to imagine that Mercury’s doctor would not have tested for HIV. Even harder to imagine that Mercury had not begun to suspect he had HIV, before having it finally confirmed.

Rumors of Mercury’s ill health date back to 1982, when he appeared thin and frail on Saturday Night Live.

Given all the stigma and fear surrounding AIDS, as well as his parents’ religious background, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the band was keeping a closely held secret.

As for Queen breaking up, no - there was no official split of the band at this point. But behind closed doors, all band-mates confirm that they had drifted personally and musically and, prior to the Live Aid show, were not looking toward a future working together.


Apr 26, 2019

Why hasn't Tether caused the cryptocurrency bubble to burst?

Everybody knew - or strongly suspected - Tether wasn’t backed by 1–1 cash deposits, and someone was being naughty with the cash reserve.

People just held Tether briefly when they thought their favorite crypto was about to fall against the dollar.

The risk that the Tether guys would get caught in that brief holding period was generally understood and tolerated.

So there really isn’t new information shocking the market.


Apr 27, 2019

What is the most beautiful video advertisement?

Hennessy recently let Ridley Scott run completely off-leash for 4 minutes, and the results are gorgeous :


Apr 27, 2019

Why do most developers say that Python should not be used to build mission-critical software systems?

Python is easy to read and write.

Mission critical software doesn’t care about that. It cares only that the code is nearly impossible to break.

The mantra of research and development - “Move fast and break things” - is no way to land the Mars Rover.


Apr 30, 2019

What are the best lesser known programs that you use?

These are mostly for Ubuntu - my system of choice. Excuse the strange formatting … Quora’s numbered-list has never quite worked :

The browser Palemoon is a lightweight, faster version of Firefox.

It's scaled down from Firefox, less customizable and sometimes refuses to render pages. However, it is much more resource efficient, so I use it as my default and launch FF when Palemoon fails. The Pale Moon Project homepage

The ancient unix command tee is standard on any system, but its legend has mostly faded into antiquity.

It takes the output of any command (stdout), and both prints it to the console and saves it into a file.
Like this,
ls -la | tee directory_listing.txt
This is handy for eyeballing data flow in a running system.

SystemBack enables you to take a complete, functional backup of your entire system in case disaster strikes.

Unlike other mechanisms, this one Actually Works - on a running system - so you can just boot into your rescue partition and get back to a good place. Systemback in Launchpad

apt-fast is like apt-get, only much faster.

It opens multiple sources and downloads your stuff torrent-style.

The Page GUI builder for Python enables you to build a WYSIWYG in minutes.

This package lives in obscurity mostly due to the name ‘Page’, which is an SEO nightmare born in hell. Which is a shame, because it stands out for being very easy to learn - the perfect tool for building a simple desktop Tk/TkInter GUI in just a couple of hours. While other tools like QtDesigner are far more powerful, nothing I’ve found is as quick and simple as Page. A Python GUI Generator

Video Download Helper will rip streaming video from your browser so you can keep it.

This last one isn’t Ubuntu/Unix specific, it’s a browser plugin for both FF and Chrome. It will download any video with a single click. It has a companion application which is perfectly safe to install. Many plugins try to do this, VideoDownloadHelper just works and keeps working.
Video DownloadHelper – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US)
Video DownloadHelper for Chrome.

SMTube (smalltube) and SMPlayer gives you Youtube - smooth and clear - using a tiny sliver of system resources.

Are you like me, and have a kick ass graphics card on your system - which you’ve not once plugged into a monitor because you use it for monster-sized math problems like Deep Learning? So the video card for your display is a $10 job from 2005 ?
Of course you’re like that. The combination of SMTube/SMPlayer somehow manages to play Youtube videos smoothly (even at full screen) on prehistoric graphics cards and negligible system resources.
SMPlayer Youtube Browser. Play YouTube videos with your favorite media player
SMPlayer - Free media player for your PC

May 3, 2019

How would you explain parallel programming to a four year old?

We have a hundred pieces of licorice, and a pair of scissors. We need to cut all the pieces in half (because we have 200 kids on our hands.)

If they are all different lengths, it’s a real drag because we have to do them one at the time.

But if they are all the same, we can line them up evenly, take a big knife and swack! - do all hundred in a single motion.

Some jobs, if they are similar, can be bundled together and handled in one go.


May 6, 2019

What evidence is there that we didn’t actually go to the moon in 1969?

There’s a lot of evidence that can be assembled to form a persuasive case that the moon landing was faked. I’ll try to give a fly-over :

Photographic anomalies : You can google these, there are a bazillion of them. Many involve suspicious shadow directions or lack of shadows altogether.

The Van Allen Belt radiation : There is a very dangerous level of radiation in the Van Allen Belt — a great swath of ionized particles held in place by the Earth’s magnetic field. There was no shielding for the astronauts to protect them from this.

Suspicious astronaut deaths : Aside from the three that died in the ground test of the Mercury program, another seven died in various random accidents like car crashes.

Technical limitations of the 1960’s. A handful of aeronautics engineers from the 1960’s, knowledgeable in the state of the art, vehemently assert that — sure, we could get into low Earth orbit, but were decades away from landing men on the moon and returning again.

Most of the evidence falls into these 4 categories.

Just as a sample, here’s a photographic anomaly (it’s high res, feel free to zoom in)

So, if the surface is “fine and powdery” as Armstrong described — how come the rocket didn’t blast a small crater in that surface — and how come no dust came down to land on those shiny metal feet? And so on.

We could do this all day. If we did, the case would build and build until a reasonable person would find themselves pretty well persuaded.

Did we land on the moon?

Of course we fucking did.

None of the anomalies hold up to cross-examination. There’s no crater because it’s a fine and powdery surface in a vacuum.

If they were landing on gravel in earth’s atmosphere, a crater would be created as the gravel particles would encounter air resistance, forming the walls and characteristic ‘lip’ of a crater. But this is more like landing on baby powder.

If you throw a handful of baby powder in your kitchen, it will fly maybe a couple feet before landing on the floor in a door-mat sized mess.

Do the same thing in a vacuum and the powder will fly away like a baseball, landing a hundred feet away.

Do it in a vacuum — in lunar gravity — and the powder lands a thousand feet away.

The dust was blown way, way clear. This also explains why the landing gear of the lunar module is pristine.

If you examine — and then vigorously cross-examine — every piece of the large body of evidence — you will emerge thoroughly convinced that the landing was real.

And I have a short-cut for you. We had an enemy at the time, the USSR. Nothing — and I mean nothing — would have delighted the Soviets more than to expose the lying capitalist bastard conspiracy to rob the human race of their greatest moment in exploration.

They were watching us. They were monitoring our radio transmissions. They themselves had orbited the moon. If any American scientist or propagandist suggested we try to fake the mission, that idea would get shot down vigorously as the threat of being exposed far outweighed the benefit of pulling it off.

And exposed we would have been. It turns out the Apollo 11 astronauts had company. As they were orbiting the moon preparing to land, another capsule from earth was also orbiting — the Soviet Luna 15 probe.

The Soviets were open with the US about their plans to launch the probe — both sides wanted to ensure neither vessel interfered with the other’s communication.

The exact purpose of the probe, however, was not made known to us. Our astronauts went ahead and landed. Shortly after that, the Luna 15 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, 500 miles away from our landing site in the Sea of Tranquility.

Previous Soviet probes had taken photographs of the dark side of the moon. So that thing was certainly bristling with cameras and radio antennae.

By sending up that probe, the Soviets had put us on notice that faking the moon landing was not an option.

In 1969 human beings from planet Earth first stepped foot on the Moon, in defiance of long odds, deadly radiation, mortal danger and … lingering incredulity.


May 6, 2019

If the average programmer is writing less than 50 lines of code per day, what does the rest of their work day consist of?

Let me describe my last 3 days.

I’m working in Machine Learning. I came across a math paper suggesting a certain technique may get me better results.

That paper contained a small error, which I corrected. Then I wrote 50 lines of code implementing the idea.

The code was too slow to run, so I had to ‘vectorize’ it (write it in a form so that many operations can be done at once.) This made the code denser, reducing it to just 12 lines.

Then I tested it with my model. Results were crazy. I realized another modification was required to the original paper.

It worked! I tried the new algorithm with datasets of various sizes.

Finally, I compared it to the standard algorithm which everybody uses.

Nope, it didn’t actually perform better.

So I took all that code out.

In 3 days, I wrote exactly zero lines of code. But I learned something.

That paper doesn’t work, and the standard way is still the best I know of.

What do we developers do all day?

We think. We read and learn, try stuff, build and replace and refine, reflect and sometimes start over.

We spend about as much time actually writing code as a doctor spends writing prescriptions.


May 8, 2019

Is it possible to learn high school math (from algebra to calculus) in 2 months?

No.

It took the human race about three millenia to go from counting on our fingers to calculus.

The fact that in modern times, we can compress this into a single lifetime - in fact, into a few years in a single lifetime - is a small miracle. Generations of thinkers have worked to bring about this pedagogical miracle. They refined and simplified our understanding of such dizzying concepts as the infinite, zero, “field extensions” (the discovery of things that apparently shouldn’t exist - negative numbers, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.) so that you can learn in years what Newton could only glimpse in a lifetime.

Attempting all this in two months is like riding a motorcycle through the Louvre. Sure, you’ll see everything in record time.

But in reality you’ve seen nothing, and insulted the great works you had hoped would enrich you.


May 10, 2019

Do you really know what a Bitcoin is and could you explain in detail to someone else?

These are called tally sticks.

They were first used in England in 1100 AD by King Henry the First. It’s a simple piece of wood, with a certain number of slashes across it, split down the middle.

The King would keep one half to be held in a guarded location. He would hand the other half to someone as a tax credit.

Say you came to trim the King’s bushes. He’d pay you with one of these things rather than some gold coin. When tax time came, you could give it to the tax collector instead of wheat, gold, or some other commodity.

Because one half can be compared to its partner in the King’s vault, the thing was impossible to copy. Because of the notches, it also recorded a quantity.

It turned out you didn’t have to wait till tax time to spend your stick. Since the King accepted it for taxes, it had value. People began trading the sticks among themselves in exchange for goods and services. The King was always happy to validate anybody’s stick, so counterfeiting was a dumb thing to even attempt.

Since you can’t fake it - that fixes the supply.

And that’s all you need to have a system of money. A fixed supply of tokens that somebody, somewhere, honors as having value. More people then honor the value, since they can always cash it in with the original group.

The supply can be fixed by uniqueness, like these sticks - or from natural scarcity, like gold. Either way works.

Bitcoin is just a modern version of these tally sticks. Instead of the king’s guards ensuring your stick is legitimate and unique - a global collection of computers churn away to create a string of letters and numbers (called a hash).

You write down the hash and it’s yours. The global computer collective - the cryptocoin ‘miners’ - have recorded that the hash belongs to you and only you. That hash will never be issued again. Basically, they have the other half of your stick.

Rather than guards, miners leverage their total computing power. Nobody can break into that vault and destroy the other half - that would require more computing power than all the world’s miners. This is beyond the capacity of even nation-states.

That half-stick is yours, and not even a king can dispute it. And because it’s not a physical object, no power on Earth can steal or destroy it.

This is new to the human experience. That’s why folks are so fascinated by cryptocurrency.


May 10, 2019

What was Alexander Graham Bell's first idea of what should be said when answering the telephone?

I don’t think he really had one. He had a vague notion that the nautical hailing ‘ahoy’ might be appropriate, but it just felt weird to say that on land.

So the era’s other great American inventor - Thomas Edison, decided to invent one just for the telephone. He wanted it kind of similar to ‘ahoy’ - short and punchy, distinctive and easy to make out even with a lot of noise present.

Thus the word “Hello” was born.


May 11, 2019

Is there a website where beginners or intermediate programmers can get help with writing their programs? I don’t mean GitHub.

You’re looking at it.

StackOverflow and Github are for getting help on very specific, often technically deep questions.

Quora generally welcomes newbie questions, even general ones of the form “Where even do I start?” Lots of writers are willing to help, and their answers form a base of introductory material that other newbies can gain from.


May 11, 2019

I had a professor who was unnecessarily disrespectful when I came in late to turn in my final (the class was three hours). I brought up that one of us is paying to be here and one of us is being paid. Is that a fair rebuttal?

Suppose you spent years becoming really good at playing piano.

And I hire you to come to my house and perform for me and five friends. You put together a playlist and run through it a few times in preparation.

You show up, and we’re all drunk, 3 are passed out, while I and the remaining conscious one are playing Red Dead Redemption. I direct you to the piano, which is actually in the basement, out of tune, and inaudible over the sound of the game upstairs that we are still playing.

I bet you’d walk out without accepting the check.

The exchange of money is only one part of human interaction.

There’s also respect, which is often the more important.


May 12, 2019

Why did Ben Shapiro lose it during his BBC interview with Andrew Neil?

Not so much a roast, as Shapiro jumped into hot coals of his own accord for no damn reason whatsoever.

Man. Did he make a jackass of himself.

The reporter was interrogating Shapiro’s views by challenging them. This used to be the standard in journalism, before America bifurcated into twin echo chambers.

It’s something Shapiro should have expected and should have practiced to death while attending Harvard Law.

Sure, Neil was confronting Shapiro with his own past statements. But Neil was really just giving Shapiro - who appears to have political aspirations in the Republican Party - a chance to shake that stuff off and position himself on the political spectrum.

Neil dragged out some outrageous statements of Shapiro’s from way back in 2012. Over the top stuff like “Any Jew who voted for Obama isn’t a real Jew” and worse about Palestinians.

Neil was being only slightly mischievous here, and really was presenting Shapiro with (outdated) Straw Men. Neil appeared to be holding the door open for Shapiro to say something like,

Oh - yea, that was a stupid thing I said. I was just 29, and - like everyone, was too angry, too tribal, and too active on Twitter (chuckle.) On my site I have a whole page of dumb tweets I shouldn’t have made.
Since then, I’ve travelled to hundreds of universities, spoken to people of all stripes and persuasions, and realized we’ve got to restore civility and respect to American politics so we don’t elect another idiot like Trump.
Oops. I think I just did it again (chuckle.) Work in progress. But yea, I could go back through my twitter feed from 8 years ago and probably top you on even worse tweets. We could do a whole show on that.
But I’d rather talk about now. Because I’m a product of that polarized, digital riot and, well, it’s not exactly been America’s proudest decade.
My book isn’t about where I was then, but where I find myself now. It’s an appeal for rational conservatism - and rational liberalism, for that matter. For civility and quality candidates on both sides.
It’s an appeal to leave Trump and Hillary and Social Justice Warriors and Alex Jones and all that divisive, delirious nonsense in the dumpster of the past, right next to all 100 of my most intemperate tweets.

Something like that. I think Neil (himself a Conservative) was secretly rooting for Shapiro, posing challenging questions to maintain the appearance of objectivity, yet fully expecting Shapiro to gracefully pivot. For Shapiro to stake his claim as a moderate American conservative, put to rest some past baggage, plug his new book, and wrap up smiling.

Neil appears genuinely confused that Shapiro didn’t see the clear opening left for him, and instead fell to pieces so badly he stormed off the set with the laughably pathetic proclamation - “I’m more popular than you!”

I never did catch the title of the book.

But I’m afraid that last line is going to stick, Ben.

(Epilogue : Shapiro just tweeted what strikes me as a nice bit of damage control. With a healthy dose of good humor, he admits to being “DESTROYED by AF Neil!” - a wink to all the youtubers who title clips of Shapiro’s debates something like “Shapiro DESTROYS crazed liberal!”. He admits to being unprepared and surrenders unconditionally.

He also attaches a list of every extreme and ‘dumb’ (his term) tweet from the past that he regrets.

I think this was a good move.)


May 12, 2019

How do I write a program on Python to compute f(n) =f(n-1) + 100 when n>0 and f(0) =1, with a given n input by console (n>0)?

Quora’s not really a place to crowdsource your homework.

Go take a stab at it, and if you get stuck come back with your code - folks will be able to help so long as you meet them half-way by making an effort.


May 15, 2019

How can I compute the probability of a given sentence using a pre-trained language model?

Various forms of Recurrent Neural Networks have been used with great success to predict what comes next in a natural language.

Most typically, they are used to predict the next word in a sentence, not the next sentence itself, but it’s the same idea. Though they can also be used to predict some sense of the meaning of the sentences as well - like is it hostile and such.

These algorithms go by such names and LSTM and GRU. They are very new and being used with great success. It’s an exciting area to work in.

Here’s a fly-over - Understanding of RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS (LSTM, GRU)

As to exactly how to use these - and a pre-trained language model like word2vec - this is a new field with no canned solutions. The bad news is you’re on your own (though can probably find some related work somewhere to guide you.) The good news is you’re now a researcher!


May 18, 2019

A senior software engineer told me that we should only use one letter variable names (or 3 max) to avoid people understanding our code and stealing our idea. Is he right?

That’s not wrong.

That’s incompetent. It’s a matter far beyond any rational debate. I would beware of this person, and of the company that employs them and allows them to work like this.

Using bad variable names to protect your code is like smashing the headlights and windshield of your car in order to make it less tempting to steal.

Yes - it works. But you didn’t protect your car.

You ruined it.


May 19, 2019

Is Sublime Text good for Python?

Hells yea, sublime is the default for most of the Python devs I know.

It has a lot of packages tailored just for Python, here’s a fly-over :

Setting Up Sublime Text 3 for Full Stack Python Development – Real Python


May 20, 2019

Why do companies like Dell not have Linux pre-installed on their computers? It would be cheaper, and they could just go with Linux Distro.

They do! Dell calls it project ‘sputnik’. In the spirit of Open Source, they let the developer-customers have a say in what specs and linux flavors would be on offer:

https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop_us

Word has it these things are selling well, as both developers and data scientists are scooping them up.


May 20, 2019

Why did Ben Shapiro lose it during his BBC interview with Andrew Neil?

There’s a small answer, and a big answer.

The small answer is that Shapiro didn’t look up who Andrew Neil was before the interview. So Shapiro didn’t know that Neil was a fellow conservative whose ‘attacks’ were simply rhetorical.

The big answer is that even though Shapiro is very experienced at handling the Media in both political camps, he doesn’t seem to have realized something that every politician learns very quickly :

You’re not speaking to the interviewer. You’re speaking to the camera.

If the interviewer is hostile, answer as if he weren’t. The viewers are likely to sympathize and listen.


May 21, 2019

Can I do AI and machine learning without math?

If you google around, you find abundant reassurance that you can do Deep Learning without knowing math.

You will be offered such comforting analogies as this :

Driving a car requires no knowledge of the engine.

Cooking requires no understanding of a microwave.

And so on.

Lies! Damnable lies!

Deep Learning is a new field that isn’t anywhere close to being turn-key. If you grab an off-the-shelf package and shove a lot of data into it, it’s probably going to spew nonsense.

Machine Learning is far more comparable to the early days of aviation. To fly that thing, you better damn well know how it works else you’re gonna die.

What if the aileron gets stuck? What does an iced up wing feel like? A fouled spark plug?

How do I drain the gas? Do I need to vent vapor or what? How do you land this thing if power gives out completely?

Deep learning is like that, in 2019. It’s all matrices and derivatives. These creatures must become familiar friends before you can fly.

When you can explain ‘Back propagation’ well enough that somebody else can code it from scratch, you’re ready to solo.

This is cold comfort for millions of managers and coders who want to cash in on the hype but don’t like math and didn’t learn it. They will offer analogies of blenders in their defense.

But beware the casual assurances of any would-be pilot who shrugs, “how hard can it be?”

You don’t want to be on-board when they find out.

Epilogue : Here’s just one article out of thousands recently published -

For most applications, your team doesn’t need to understand the mathematics of back-propagation any more than a chef needs to know the wiring diagram for a microwave. - Why businesses fail at machine learning

In the field of Deep Learning, this is the siren call to certain doom.


May 22, 2019

What are your thoughts on the Brave web browser?

I use it now as my daily browser. I suggest it to my friends.

Some background : Of all the browsers, Brave is the subversive rebel. A whiskey guzzling, joint smoking outlaw. On several occasions, a posse has been dispatched to take it down, without success - Publishers Strike Back at a Browser That Replaces Their Ads .

It’s about their radical approach to ads. Many articles say Brave “replaces” in-page ads with their own. That’s not correct at all.

Built into the browser is a very aggressive ad-blocker. Since it’s wired into the engine itself, rather than living in an extension, ad-blocking is done sooner, faster and more thoroughly.

Brave does not replace them with anything. By default, Brave just leaves them out and not another word is spoken on the matter.

You can, however, opt in to their ad program. This doesn’t touch your browser pages, but rather shows you a brief tweet-sized ad in a notification window that pops up just above your browser. One click dismisses it.

Why the hell would anyone opt-in to these ads? Because 70% of that ad revenue is paid directly to you.

OK, admit it. You just said “Whoah.”

So did I. Whether or not you’re interested in earning nickels for ads, it’s pretty clear what a massively disruptive threat Brave is to business-as-usual on the Web.

But I don’t use Brave because of ads. Truth is, I don’t care all that much about ads and recognize that advertising funds content.

I use it for the speed boost that ad-blocking brings. I don’t think anyone anticipated how overgrown the tentacles of advertising would become in 2019. It’s not just about a band-aid sized patch of content that shows up; before you see that all sorts of mechanisms have gone off : a tracker surmises your age and location and reports back to an ad engine to look up an ad targeted for you. Another tracker watches when you’ve scrolled off, when your mouse is about to exit the window, and on and on.

Removing all this really, really speeds things up and reduces RAM usage. Brave makes claims of speed boosts by a factor of 8, which is a wild exaggeration with a contrived example.

But the speed boost is huge.

But won’t I go to hell, by depriving the web of ad revenue and bringing famine upon content-creators?

No, you can turn off the ‘shield’ voluntarily for any site you wish. I’m careful to do so for sites I frequent and care about. (Hi Quora! Shield down.)

You can also take the money you accrue by having ads on, and donate that directly to a content creator. A lot of bloggers and youtubers are pretty excited about that.

You’ll need to drop that shield occasionally anyway. Brave’s ad-blocking occasionally prevents a page from rendering correctly. (The server detects the blocker and refuses to cooperate.) In my experience this happens about 1% of the time. So drop the shield, refresh, and carry on.

That inconvenience is repaid 10-fold by the overall boost in speed.

You won’t find a lot of press about Brave. The verge gave it a shout-out here, Why I chose Brave as my Chrome browser replacement. But otherwise, there’s not much buzz. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the press doesn’t want to give exposure to a gizmo that’s declared open war on their revenue stream.

Of course, people like me write posts like this. And people like you decide for themselves to give it a try : Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser


May 24, 2019

What does it mean to reprogram your subconscious mind?

Your email spam filter needs an update.


May 25, 2019

Why doesn't anyone believe Alex Jones?

Alex Jones is a fascinating character.

One thing the media doesn’t mention, and a primary cause of his popularity, is that he is whip-smart. Really goddamn smart. He has at his command virtually everything he has ever read, and can rattle off details and specifics spanning decades of American black ops, quotations and credentials from thousands of people, and on and on. He can rapidly connect and integrate this information into his running narrative faster than a team of 30 researchers could ever hope to.

He doesn’t spew nonsense; he constructs a world-view so vast, richly detailed and consistent that it nearly rivals the real.

That’s the draw. If you listen long enough, though, eventually you’ll see a glitch in the matrix. He lets on that he is bat-shit fucking crazy.

He will assert that the earth is controlled by alien-lizard people. That democrats are hell-spawn demons and - in fact - in still air they smell like sulphur.

He will remove his shirt and beat his chest.

Partisanship aside, this sort of thing leaves a man with precious little credibility.


May 26, 2019

Why can’t we take oxygen out of the water so divers have an unlimited supply of oxygen? Fish can do it; why haven’t we figured it out yet?

Power. It would require a battery heavier than an air tank.

Fish are cold-blooded so they use the scant oxygen that’s actually dissolved in water. We warm-blooded mammal types use much more.

Of course, there’s an oxygen atom in every molecule of H20. It’s happy there, though. Both the oxygen and hydrogen are in a “low energy state”.

Like a spring that’s laying there, uncompressed.

We can break the bonds that tie the oxygen to the hydrogen by, for example, putting an electric current through the water (hydrolysis.) This takes a lot of energy.

O2 by itself is a coiled spring; it essentially soaked up the energy from the battery. Same for the hydrogen.

Mammals actually use that energy to power our warm and active bodies.

Here’s a striking demonstration of all that energy which you can try at somebody else’s house : Take a big volume of hydrogen, add half that much oxygen, and then strike a match.

BOOM! It blows up in a big fireball.

There won’t be any smoke though. The only thing the explosion leaves behind is … pure water.


May 27, 2019

My friend always talks about this and it really bothers me. Is it true that grad/med/law schools look at your GPA differently if you come from a more ‘prestigious’ undergrad compared to others who did not?

Yes, if you come from a ‘top-tier’ school, that both looks good in itself and colors the way they view your transcript.

But not always in the way your friend suggests.

Having a mediocre GPA from a top school sends up a few red flags. Those schools have higher average GPA’s over the student population. If your GPA is low, your rank is going to be very low.

Some people believe this higher average is due to the fact the top schools get to pick the best freshman. And that’s certainly true.

Others suspect there is a good deal of ‘grade inflation’ at these schools. Once you’re in, your part of the elite club - and they take care of their own. At some schools, there’s a bit of truth to that too.

Either way, if you come out of these places with a low GPA, you’re an outlier. It appears that something has gone significantly wrong during your time there.

It arouses a certain suspicion that students with solid GPAs from other schools compare favorably against.


May 28, 2019

How do I overcome my hatred toward conservatives, and what they stand for?

I’m a (classic) Liberal, but count many conservatives among my friends, including Jon Davis and the folks over at War Elephant .

In order to stop hating conservatives, or any other group you find adversarial, you must first make peace.

Plot twist ahead …

Not peace with conservatives, but peace with your fellow liberals.

Making peace with someone whose values and philosophy are identical to yours isn’t hard because it isn’t necessary. There is no area of conflict.

But no two people are going to have identical ideologies on every possible issue. No two thoughtful people, anyway.

There’s got to be some point where you break with most of your fellow liberals. Maybe you favor nuclear power to get off fossil fuels. Maybe you think the welfare state incentivizes teen pregnancy. Or that affirmative action is a well-intended but misguided.

Somewhere, there has to be a place where you break ranks.

Let’s say you’re pro-nuclear. With safe thorium salt reactors, you’re convinced that reactor accidents have been a result of 1960’s reactor design and it’s time to move forward into a CO2 neutral future which cuts dependence on foreign oil.

Your liberal buddies don’t think so. Talk to them about it. Now, it’s not likely you’re going to change their minds or vice-versa. That’s OK, the point is to explore your differences.

Do they not believe that safe designs are possible at all? Or that the profit-driven corporations cannot be entrusted with such dangerous technology? Or that a drive to nuclear would divert resources that should go into wind and solar - which is known to be risk free?

The idea isn’t to die on that hill, but rather just to find that hill. Myself, I often conclude the conversation with a, “I get it. So we disagree on the basic point of X. Fair enough.”

And that’s making peace.

You will find a great many people don’t accept that reasonable people can differ on anything - they refuse to make peace with you.

That alone is very illuminating. To see just how aggressively your own tribe reacts to simple dissent.

But if you keep trying, it won’t be long until you find someone who is happy to peaceably and respectfully explore the differences between you. Other peace-makers.

The way to stop hating conservatives is to stop hating your fellow liberals. That is, liberals who bear a disagreement. And ignore - and avoid - their hatred of you that arises from even the slightest dissent.

And now - all you have to do is walk across the aisle.


May 29, 2019

People in the UK are often confused by some Americans’ attachment to guns. Why this attachment and did any key historical events spark this trend towards gun ownership?

I have a pet theory about this.

America didn’t evolve naturally like Eurasia did. Eurasia developed over thousands of years from hunter-gatherer to the Industrial Revolution beginning in around 1750.

By this time, Eurasian people had guns and much more : There were steam engines and advanced metallurgy, huge irrigated farms leading to a population explosion which gathered densely in cities and most crucially - great ships and navigation.

Focusing now on Europe in particular - by 1750 guns were widely accessible but there was little need for the average person to invest in one. There were no wild animals to be afraid of; stable governments ruled over vast areas enforcing the law everywhere. A peasant typically lived in a village not far from a small city and either worked on a wealthier person’s farm or had a trade like weaving or black-smithing. If you gave them a gun, they would probably sell it to upgrade their home.

The Americas developed in a starkly different way. A trickle of migration across the Bering Strait occurred sometime during the last Ice Age. They probably just walked across the Bering Strait which was frozen solid.

When the ice receded, they were cut off from Eurasia. Now - these hunter-gatherers were amazingly resourceful. Especially the Mayans who independently developed technology that rivaled Ancient Egypt.

But they didn’t benefit from contact with the great swath of humanity across Eurasia. From England to China there was a constant exchange of technology and knowledge enabling a rush forward to the age of seaborne migration and the industrial age.

In 1500, America was in 2500 BC in terms of technology. Then something happened unique to the human experience : America jumped 3 millenia ahead in 250 years.

In one of humanity’s greatest tragedies, the indigenous people were almost completely wiped out. First by smallpox and other disease, and then by deliberate genocide and displacement.

In 1750, one million Europeans were now living in the Americas. Ships arrived daily bearing modern technology and purchasing goods for export.

These people had guns, the printing press, steam and so on, but now occupied a mostly untamed wilderness. Dangerous predators like bears, wolves and mountain lions surrounded them. The protection of police and government extended over a tiny sliver of the coast. The indigenous people, in the throes of their spiralling decline, were often lethally hostile.

In 1650, a European settler would rather lose his house than his gun. The gun meant safety and meat.

By 1750, America was becoming occupied by a population identical to Europe in every way but one - the American colonists were universally armed and practiced marksmen.

A nation of modern shooters. A gun-culture which has diminished greatly with the urbanization of the late 1800’s, but with roots that still run deep and still holds sway over much of America.

And it’s not just America. It’s Canada, Australia and Mexico too. In fact, when you zoom way out, you can clearly see the massive disruption that occurs when guns first cross the ocean :


May 29, 2019

With all the various nicotine substitutes (patches, gum, e-cigs, etc.) what has been effective at helping quit smoking cigarettes?

The UK’s NHS recently published that vaping is almost twice as effective as other Nicotine Replacement Therapies -

E-cigs 'twice as effective' than nicotine patches, gum or sprays for quitting


May 30, 2019

Should I go for TensorFlow or PyTorch?

PyTorch is for innovation.

PyTorch’s dynamic graph structure lets you experiment with every part of the model. Want to make your own loss function? One that adapts over time or reacts to certain conditions? Maybe your own optimizer?

Want to try something really weird like growing extra layers during training?

Whatever - PyTorch is just here to crunch the numbers - you drive.

Tensorflow is for rapid asssembly, tuning and distribution of conventional models.

It’s got a big menu of well-known components. From Convolutional Nets for image recognition to Recurrent Nets for language and anything else you might read about. Grab it, stack it, and you’re off.

You’re free to play with hyper-parameters all day long, do Data Analysis to search for hidden signals, gaze at awe-inspiring visualizations on a gizmo called TensorBoard.

Just don’t try to get too close to the whirling blades of any of those components.

If you try to, say, build your own optimizer you will hit a Brick. Fucking. Wall.

Say hello to Tensorflow’s static graph. You say you want to do a calculation, and would like to know the loss from layer 3 to feed an equation? Yea, no. That value doesn’t exist yet, it’s stuck in this graph structure and scheduled for later. No, you can’t change the structure. What you gotta do is, OK - make a placeholder, or maybe a variable, or I think it’s a slot … anyway, you need to create a Tensorflow session so that you can run evaluate …

Oh - and Python debug breakpoints won’t work anymore.

So things can’t see other things. And you can’t see them either.

You’re going to need an old priest and a young priest.

Oh! But TensorFlow just launched Eager Execution in version 1.13 that fixes all that so you can program ‘imperatively’ (a polite term for not needing an exorcist.)

Yea, no. Eager Execution will slow your model down by a factor of 20. Two hours just became two days. Forget about it.

Tensorflow is like a bus. A great way to get a bunch of people to a well-travelled destination.

PyTorch is like an all-terrain vehicle. The best to go exploring off the beaten path.


May 30, 2019

How is TensorFlow eager execution different from PyTorch? Is it making TensorFlow like PyTorch in terms of coding paradigm?

Yes, that’s the basic idea. Eager Execution is an effort to make Tensorflow more ‘imperative’. To oversimplify a bit - to make the code examinable and interruptible. So you can set a breakpoint and look at a variable.

Traditional Tensorflow uses a static graph which causes operations to occur in a vastly different sequence than the code you wrote.

This makes debugging difficult and research nearly impossible. If you’re doing anything slightly innovative - I suggest you take along an old priest and a young priest.

PyTorch also uses a graph which reorganizes the sequence of operations, but doesn’t saddle you with any constraining assumptions. You can always set a breakpoint and ‘detach’ a value; you can write code like a sane person and the right thing happens. Their graph is a dynamic one which does this optimization without tripping you up.

TensorFlow has been trying to move in this direction with ‘Eager Execution’.

TensorFlow isn’t there yet. This is a major mid-course correction, in terms of architecture. The feature was moved into ‘core’ at version 1.7.

It was a very hard turn which tipped a lot of things over.

The support has been broadened and improved up to the current production release of 1.13 . But :

Don’t use it. It’s broken.

Depending on your model, you might take a speed reduction by a factor of 20. It’s buggy. Their own documented examples often don’t work.

But stay tuned :

Tensorflow 2.0 is (hopefully) reworked from the ground up to solve all this. It’s currently in the alpha-testing stage.

Given Google’s engineering resources and ML experience I expect they’ll get it right.

The Eager saga has been embarassing to them and caused them to lose favor with most ML researchers. While PyTorch has only 18% or something of Tensorflow’s users, those are the 18% that Google most covets.

So getting it right with 2.0 will enable Google to save face, win over researchers, and deal a death blow to Facebook’s PyTorch. (There’s bad blood between these companies ever since Google tried to murder Facebook with G+).

TensorFlow’s visualization tools (TensorBoard) could be the carrot to induce researchers to make the effort to switch over.


Jun 1, 2019

When you ask a Harvard grad where they went to school, is it less annoying when they just say "Harvard", or when they say "Boston" and then force you to keep probing until you figure it out in a "grand, amazing reveal"?

Around Boston (and at Harvard), mentioning “Harvard” is called “dropping the H-bomb.”

Doing it unprompted is considered uncouth, “When I was at Harvard …”. Nope.

If asked directly, “Where did you go to school”, you should answer directly “Harvard”.

Finding a winding path in order to work it sideways into conversation doesn’t fool anybody and is still dropping the H-bomb.

Answering “Boston” is geographically inaccurate; answering “Cambridge” in order to prod further questioning is also H-bomb jack-assery. (This comes close to a larger class of jackassery called the Humble-Brag.)

In short, you mention it when it is necessarily relevant to the conversation.

And if you went to Harvard Extension - don’t even think about dropping the H-bomb.


Jun 2, 2019

What are examples of “mansplaining” with context?

It is one of two things :

The almost universal habit of dim-witted, insecure people to state the obvious in a futile effort to appear smart. The term ‘mansplaining’ is a confused effort to re-interpret this dynamic as a gender conflict when a woman is on the receiving end.

The almost universal habit of dim-witted, insecure people to object to being factually corrected by attacking the speaker in a futile effort to appear smart. The term ‘mansplaining’ is a confused effort to re-interpret this dynamic as a gender conflict when a man is on the receiving end.

(I’m male. If you’re female and wish to accuse me of mansplaining ‘mansplaining’, see item 2)


Jun 3, 2019

My teacher claims that if restaurant owners raise food prices when the minimum wage increases, they’re doing it because they're greedy, not because of the minimum wage increasing. Is he right or wrong?

Well, he’s essentially right, but he’s trying to fool you with charged language and a false dichotomy.

Restaurant owners will indeed raise prices because they are greedy and because of the minimum wage rising.

Business owners are - and should be - greedy. They have a duty to their investors to be.

“Greedy” is a term designed to evoke a visceral negative reaction. One that’s rooted in the fairy tales of your childhood. Ebenezer Scrooge comes to mind so automatically you’re not aware that you’re being manipulated.

In the adult world of global commerce, we call it “maximizing profit”, not “being greedy.”

Maximizing profit isn’t just for the rich investors and owners. The employees and customers benefit from it, whether they realize it or not.

Here’s an experiment : Check your credit card bill for the last 30 meals you ate away from home.

Most likely, most of them are chains. It might have been Five-guys, or Chipotle, or Au Bon Pain. Or maybe you keep it simple and it was MacDonald’s or Subway. I don’t judge. But your credit card can bear witness for me here.

These companies maximized profits. They squeezed every last dime they could out of their customers. This doesn’t mean they can jack up prices as high as they want. Customers would flee and profits would plummet. They had to compete to offer you the best value at the lowest price to find the magic equilibrium where profits are at a maximum. The point where the quality is high enough to fill the restaurant, and the price is just high enough that it stays full of customers, and not a cent higher.

This is how they got to be ‘chains’. Each store was so profitable that investors were happy to build another just like it.

“Greed” - the maximizing of profit - isn’t some conspiracy of the wealthy designed to oppress you. It’s the unseen force that put your favorite place there in the first place.

Right nearby where you work or live. To serve your favorite foods.

To employ all those people.

You can pass a law requiring owners to pay workers as high a wage as you like.

But be careful. It’s still legal to bulldoze the place.


Jun 3, 2019

Do you think PyTorch will be more popular than TensorFlow?

My guess is PyTorch’s days are numbered. We’ll know the answer pretty soon.

PyTorch comes from Facebook. It’s a very flexible research tool that Facebook mostly built from the ground up.

Tensorflow is from Google. It’s much less flexible, but easier to rapidly assemble prototypes with. This is largely due to Keras, an outer layer that hides a great many implementation details with an eye toward rapid prototyping.

The inflexibility of Tensorflow was baked in from the start; Google sort of fumbled the inception of it. It was made to modernize Theano, the original back-end to Keras.

Theano was inflexible (due to its static computation graph), and Tensorflow followed in its footsteps.

So now have we have researchers loving PyTorch, and tinkerers loving Tensorflow. The Tensorflow-tinkerers outnumber Pytorch researchers by 4:1 .

As we speak, Google is hard at work to remedy this rift. Tensorflow is being endowed with ‘Eager Execution’ - the magic stuff which enables the flexibility that researchers demand. (It’s a dynamic, rather than static computation graph.)

This has been in the works for some time as an option in Tensorflow 1.7–1.13 . It’s not really usable; the two architectures coexist in conflict with each other. Performance can grind to a halt, documentation is wrong, strange behavior is the norm.

But Tensorflow 2.0 is now in alpha testing. “Eager execution” isn’t an option, it’s the default. It’s (allegedly) built into the foundation, so it will offer the researcher the very freedom they enjoy in PyTorch, but will bring them into the same (much larger) community of Tensorflow.

Google has the resolve, expertise and manpower to pull it off. If they succeed, it should generate a global productivity uptick as researchers and practitioners are on the same framework. A research paper published today can be put in practice tomorrow.

Godspeed, Tensorflow. Watch your back, PyTorch.


Jun 5, 2019

Is it a good idea to switch from PyTorch to TensorFlow Eager?

Not yet. I just came off a stint of trying to use Eager Execution in Tensorflow 1.13.

It’s broken. You’ll waste a lot of time as performance slows to a crawl, documentation is wrong, behavior is unpredictable.

TF 2.0 is intended to fix all this. Currently in alpha testing .


Jun 5, 2019

What are some red flags that a Quora answer isn't worth reading?

Any answer that uses eye-candy as click-bait.

I skip them all.


Jun 6, 2019

Why do people use Tensorflow when there is Keras?

Welp. This is awkward.

Keras sits atop Tensorflow. It’s a wrapper which hides some TF details from you.

Originally, the backend for Keras was Theano, but Theano is no longer under development. Keras maintains the option to use the Theano backend for legacy purposes, but otherwise Keras and Tensorflow are inseparable.


Jun 7, 2019

Who were the top five henchmen of Adolf Hitler? Which of them survived and exonerated from Nazi crimes?

At the risk of doing your history homework for you, that would be Himmler (head of SS), Göring (head of air forces, Gestapo, and next in line to take Hitler’s place), Speer (Minister of Armaments, used prison labor to power the vast war machine), Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda - did much to convince the Germans that it was OK to hate Jews and conquer their neighbors - and not to surrender toward the end).

Those were really the main 4. The fifth has a lot of candidates - Rudolph Hess was Hitler’s faithful toadie since the early twenties, enacted the Nuremberg Laws (which stripped Jews of their citizenship.) But he was in British custody for most of the war and was 72% bonkers.

Bormann’s another candidate, he was Hitler’s “personal secretary” but really controlled what Hitler knew, and assumed a great deal of operational control over Germany in the latter days.

Of the top 4, none were exonerated. Hess and Speer were not executed. Hess was absent for most of the War, and really held on to marginal authority prior to that. He also was clearly not mentally healthy enough to defend himself.

Speer served 20 years in prison and was free to go. An increasing number of historians consider that he was given an unfair pass. He was actually using prison labor so had direct knowledge of the death camps; his resourcefulness in keeping the German war economy on life support extended the war by many months at least.

But unlike his peers, Speer was a brilliant aristocrat. The Tribunal liked him, in comparison. He wasn’t defiant, but rather apologetic. He pled guilty. He testified against his codefendants.

Looking back now, knowing all he did and all he knew, it appears to many that Speer talked his way out of the Nuremberg Trials.


Jun 8, 2019

What kind of rewards have you received from using the Brave Browser?

I’ve been using Brave for two weeks now. The big reward I’ve gotten is time. To say that Brave has powerful ad-blocking and tracker-prevention gives a false impression : That Brave is for people who don’t like ads and worry about privacy.

Most people grumble about these issues, but speed is what really matters. A second-delay while browsing the web is a huge mental disruption. It’s as if you’re reading a book, flip a page, and the lights go out for one second.

Yes, it’s just a second. But you were reading. Caught up in the context of a stream of thought.

Ads and trackers slow your browser down. Because they are communicating in this elaborate two-way chatter between your machine and various back-end servers.

Brave shuts that down and removes those delays. Here are my stats from 2 weeks of Brave :

Brave shows you this whenever you open a new tab. They’re proud of it.

With good reason, apparently. 51,000 ads !? Yup. Almost a thousand trackers. Mmhmm.

But look at the 44 minutes. You might think 44 minutes over two weeks is nice, sure. Not some epic breakthrough in productivity but impressive enough - now I can watch an extra Black Mirror episode.

But you shouldn’t think of it as a single block of time. Rather, break it down into one-second delays. You’re reading a book, flip a page, and the lights go out for a second.

Brave prevented 2,800 of those micro-blackouts.

Now, the analogy is a bit of a stretch. After all, there is always some delay when you load a new page.

So to state it more accurately, we might say that Brave cut the duration of 5,000 of those black-outs in half.

No matter how you parse this out, it becomes clear this is a Big Fucking Deal.

During the last 2 weeks, I also opted in to Brave’s ad program. Meaning I volunteer to allow Brave to serve up little, tweet-sized ads. These ads don’t interfere with content, they appear above the browser - no graphics, just text.

Brave is clever about not pushing your patience with this. It seems to sense when you’re busy. When I’m typing away like I am now, Brave never serves up an ad. It also will take long stretches of time where it shows no ads at all - so much so I have wondered whether my ads are still on.

I opted in for ads because of the other reward Brave offers: a cryptocurrency called BAT (Basic Attention Token).

In two weeks I accrued about 5 bucks worth. (Most of it was a random direct gift from Brave, which they do occasionally. But some from ad-watching.) My BAT fortune sits in a wallet I can check any time.

I can just hold it. Given historical explosions in value for certain cryptocurrencies, no telling how valuable it might become.

But I’ll probably use it to tip content-creators. Small operators on YouTube who don’t have millions of subscribers, but who work hard to cover less popular subjects like astronomy. Or who got demonetized for political reasons. That sort of thing.

Brave has enrolled many thousands of content-creators thus far (including some major news outlets), but most small-time creators aren’t signed up yet. (For recent stats see Monitoring Brave Browser adoption )

So I’m going to hold these BAT and hand them out as my favorite channels enroll.

I must say, being empowered to directly support media that I love, using money I earned by not looking at embedded ads - merely tolerating unobtrusive, occasional ‘ad-tweets’ - feels pretty good.

And this post only took about 20 minutes to write. That leaves 24.

I think I’ll watch South Park …


Jun 10, 2019

Who are some famous historical figures that many people would be surprised to know were Nazis?

Werner Heisenberg (of Uncertainty Principle fame.)

He was never a Nazi Party member; in fact the Nazis initially targeted him in the press as a “White Jew”, having been friendly with Einstein and an early supporter of Relativity (considered “Jewish science”.)

However, Heisenberg worked hard to try to build the Nazis an atomic bomb. Before the outbreak of the war, he was approached by some prominent American scientists and offered asylum in the US.

Heisenberg purportedly asked why he might do such a thing.

“To help save the world from Hitler.”

Heisenberg replied, “I have seen what the world can do to Germany” and turned the offer down.

Once the war was on, the US sent an assassin to kill Heisenberg in order to halt the Nazi atomic program. The assassin was, interestingly, an accomplished poker player.

A man with an amazing knack for seeing in an opponent’s eyes what sort of cards he held.

The assassin was locked and loaded but determined at the last second (correctly) that Heisenberg was holding no atomic aces. His life was spared.

After the war, Heisenberg insisted that he was really sabotaging the atomic bomb effort the whole time. That story doesn’t really hold up to historical scrutiny.

He probably should have been tried for war crimes, but there was a general unspoken amnesty for scientists and engineers (like Von Braun) after the war.

In addition to their value to the arsenals of the victors, there was a desire to rescue Science from the ashes of World War II. After all, it was the V2 rockets which terrorized London that evolved into the Saturn rockets which carried Man to the Moon.


Jun 11, 2019

What topics/questions within machine learning should I research if I want my work to have the biggest "real world" impact?

Jump into one of the competitions on Kaggle - Your Home for Data Science

Companies like Google, Quora, etc pose challenges to real-world AI problems that matter to their business, and for which a better solution is sought. Often with a cash bounty.

It’s a very mutually supportive community where people share ideas, questions, advice and code.


Jun 11, 2019

Are Linux users broke? Why wouldn’t they want a usable OS like Windows or MacOS?

Linux is the platform of choice for developers at Google. They even have their own distro called Goobuntu.

Given the company’s net worth of ~ $270 Billion, I doubt this choice is motivated by poverty.


Jun 12, 2019

What do you tell a CEO that says that developers don't make you any money?

“Google”.


Jun 15, 2019

What should someone do if every time they give up smoking, even with the help of NRT, they feel so tired they have to go to bed and they can't function at all?

That’s very common. Next to irritability, feeling tired and listless is probably the biggest withdrawal effect. Nicotine’s a stimulant, so when you pull it away, you feel sedated.

You might want to try waiting it out. That effect might last only a week or so. That’s the period when all the withdrawal symptoms peak and then start to recede. Can you take a week off work for it?

You could also look at your diet. Are you used to waking up and smoking? That’s what most smokers do. Instant stimulant hit to wake you up.

Do you also skip breakfast? That may be your problem. Nicotine signals your body to release your glucose stores, which revs up your brain instantly.

You can create this same effect by eating some fruit (and maybe some oatmeal or something to help with the crash afterward.) This raises your glucose levels.

Finally, you can talk to your doctor. S/he really wants to help you quit smoking - it’s the single most important health issue for most patients at any age. S/he may prescribe a replacement stimulant like those typically used for ADHD.

Here’s an NIH article on the topic - ADHD medication reduces cotinine levels and withdrawal in smokers with ADHD .

You can do it! By noticing what withdrawal effects are too difficult for you, and seeking out information to deal with it, you’re showing the kind of resolve and insight that leads to success.


Jun 16, 2019

I'm 16, not great at math, but very interested in it. Is it possible for me to become a mathematician?

Absolutely. High school math classes typically don’t offer even a glimpse of what real math is like.

High school math is about calculation. I didn’t do well in it either, if memory serves.

But I went on to major in the subject. I didn’t go to grad school, so wouldn’t call myself a mathematician. But I still use lots of math every day.

At this point, I’d say not only is it possible for you to become a mathematician - but actually you’re a blank slate.

You haven’t seen real math yet in a classroom.

You may wish to talk to some faculty at a local college, or some folks here. (‎Alon Amit (אלון עמית)‎ is the big mathematical gun, but there are others too.)

Between now and college, the biggest topics you want to shore up are Analytic Geometry and Introductory Calculus. But not to grind out exam answers - to really understand it.

You may want to try taking the Advanced Placement credit exam. You can skip a year (or something) of math classes if you get a good grade. More importantly, it’s good practice for college level math.

You’ve got 1, 2(?) years. Lotta time there.


Jun 17, 2019

What parts of American history are forgotten by most people?

We owe our Freedom to the French.

Yea, I know. I don’t like saying it either.

This is perhaps over-stated; it’s possible the Colonists could have won the Revolutionary War without French assistance. But it’s hard to make that case. The French Navy was absolutely pivotal, especially in the final defeat at Yorktown.

As was the high-born Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette :

At the tender age of just 18, Lafayette wanted to join a number of French military types to help the Colonies fight France’s eternal nemesis, England.

But the Colonies had no money to pay Lafayette’s passage. So he bought his own ship, loaded it with goodies and set sail for America. He learned a great deal of English on his way over.

Unlike his fellow Frenchmen who were trickling across the Atlantic, Lafayette asked to speak to Washington and volunteered - in English - to work for no pay at all.

Washington had an almost supernatural genius for recognizing greatness in others. Both men had the habit to ‘conquer by stooping’ - insisting they felt themselves unequal to the task at hand, but will try their utmost anyway.

When Lafayette first saw Washington’s regular soldiers (untrained, filthy and drunk), Lafayette offered, “I am here to learn, not teach.”

Which Washington correctly interpreted as, “Holy crap, what a mess. Let me fix this.”

Lafayette - though technically lacking authority to command Colonial troops - got the troops clean, sober, and properly drilled for combat.

He fought valiantly alongside Washington, was wounded in the leg, shared the misery of Valley Forge. His exploits of cunning and heroism spanned the whole East Coast throughout the war. Despite his youth and foreign birth, Congress elevated him to the rank of major-general. He was so important to the Rebels that the British once dispatched 5,000 troops with the sole aim of capturing him.

In every town in New England, no matter how small - there is a Main Street. And a Washington Street.

And a Lafayette Street.

Now, I just plucked out Lafayette because I think he is the most shining personal example. More generally, our Revolutionary War was just part of a French-British world war. By engaging the British around the globe, as well as pouring men and materiel into the Colonies, the British were badly weakened.

Both nations were hurting financially (in large part due to their last war). This new war, in retrospect, was financially ruinous to both empires.

Great Britain recovered, of course, but helping the Americans was a major cause of France’s financial crisis in 1789 which heralded the ultimate collapse of the French monarchy.

So, France : Yea, our two cultures never got along all that well. But we are forever in your debt.

America said it at Normandy and I’ll say it again here :

Merci.


Jun 19, 2019

If Hubble showed the farther an object the faster it travels from us, what's profound about the Nobel-winning discovery that the universal expansion is accelerating? How does it relate to expanding space-time and gravitational red shift?

(This looks suspicously like an exam question, but I’ll give benefit of a doubt and answer part 1.)

An accelerated expansion of the universe, at its simplest, offers us a big answer and a big question.

Before the discovery, we didn’t know the eventual fate of the universe. Would it keep expanding forever, leading to the ‘heat death’ of the Cosmos? Or is there enough mass so the expansion would slow to a stop, reverse, and finally collapse into a Big Crunch? And then perhaps re-explode in a Bang/Crunch cycle?

Now we know - or think we know - that the Cosmos isn’t turning around. It looks like it’ll just spread out and cool off, leading to the “Big Freeze” or “Big Rip”. The upshot is the Big Bang was a singularity that won’t be repeated. It’s a one-off Cosmos.

So that’s the big answer.

The big question is : Where is all that energy coming from to accelerate all this mass? Is it ‘dark energy’? Or do we really need energy at all, if it’s the underlying space-time that is itself accelerating? How do we define energy then?

That big question is wide open right now.


Jun 19, 2019

Why are pointers so difficult to understand for computer programmers these days when they are, in principle, no more difficult than postal addresses?

I think it’s because a variable is a Leaky abstraction - Wikipedia. That is, it’s an elegant idea which hides the inner workings of computer memory.

Except when it doesn’t. There are cases where the variable notion gets all tied up in knots trying to dance around the mention of a memory address.

We end up piling on more abstractions like const, ref, pass-by-value,pass-by-reference, pass-by-assignment, assignment-operators, copy-operators and on and on. Oh - and here’s a bunch of exceptions for Arrays. And strings.

And another thing, inheritance introduces some subtleties …

STAWP! That’s enough out of you, variable abstraction.

But in the first days of learning to program, the variable abstraction is much nicer than raw memory. So most people start there.

Then they hit pointers (or some form of the reference/value distinction.) People who started with raw memory - C or assembly - need no lesson on pointers. They see them instantly, before they even have a word for them.

But for the newbie who started with a higher level language, this is the first time the variable abstraction has begun to leak. Their original, naive conception of a variable must now be augmented to include notions like reference, value, const and all that stuff.

It’s not that variables are bad. They are just necessarily complicated, and appear deceptively simple to new programmers.

So complicated, in fact, it’s easiest to understand their behavior in terms of their underlying memory operations. In terms of pointers.

It’s my view that low-level programming in C or whatever should be learned first, so that pointers are already familiar. Then the student can use their intuition of pointers to clarify their thinking of variables , rather than getting confused by all the extra language and abstractions which is - at heart - just a catalog of all the ways one can think about a memory address.


Jun 19, 2019

How did the legacies of Watergate and the Vietnam War shape US politics?

Ah, Final Exam time has rolled around once again.

Here’s a pro-tip : Combined questions like this give away the fact you’re crowd-sourcing your schoolwork.

Break it apart into two. This way, Quora gets two questions that are valuable to the larger community, and you get a better chance at answers.

Pro-tip #2 : The answers probably already exist, if you search for them.


Jun 20, 2019

What happened to the prettiest girl in your high school?

A fictionalized version of her lives in infamy. I’d leave her name out, but I really can’t.

She was Wendy Shrednicki, and over one summer she suddenly blossomed into a stunningly beautiful young woman.

She had an English class with a teacher who was also an aspiring author.

Her teacher wrote her into his book. Arguably he should have made a better effort to modify her name : Wendy Shrednicki became Kippy Strednicki. In the novel, Kippy was a beautiful but vacuous ‘mean girl’. (Which, by the way, Wendy never was. She was very smart and nice to everyone.)

I am quite sure the teacher would have obscured the name more carefully had he known the book would shoot to the top of the NYT Best Seller’s List.


Jun 20, 2019

Could Iran really sink an American carrier battle group ?

Not yet.

I used to work for the US Navy doing war-game simulations. One ‘nightmare scenario’ is that a small, tactical nuclear weapon (1/50 the strength of Hiroshima or so) is used to sink an entire carrier battle group.

Because a shock wave carries vastly more punch in water than in air, a small nuke under-water can easily breach the hulls of both surface ships and submarines over a considerable distance, promptly sinking them.

If a nuclear tipped torpedo is used, there’s no way to even tell who launched the thing.

Here’s an impressive test of just such a weapon by the Soviet Union :


Jun 21, 2019

What is your opinion about the new The Twilight Zone TV series reboot on CBS All Access?

Audiences hate it. 75% of its original viewership have quit watching.

CBS doesn’t publish ratings for its programming, but we can get a pretty good estimate from IMDB. The total number of user ratings — people who gave 1 to 10 stars — is a decent proxy for total viewers. Trends are especially easy to spot.

And man, does it look bad for Jordan Peele’s reboot of Twilight Zone :

According to this, The Zone has been dropped from 2400 reviews in Episode 1 to just 600 reviews for the finale.

You might object that reviews don’t reliably indicate viewers, because people naturally tend to review a new show in the early episodes, or haven’t yet watched the later episodes.

Well, for comparison’s sake, here’s the Zone along with the surprise hit Chernobyl from HBO :

A couple of things are clear from this : IMDB rating counts don’t naturally drop with time. And the entire season of Twilight Zone had less viewership than the first twenty minutes of Chernobyl.

Go home, Twilight Zone, you suck.


Jun 23, 2019

What would be your first words on Mars?

“̶O̶h̶.̶ ̶H̶i̶,̶ ̶M̶a̶r̶k̶.̶”̶

“Oh. Hi, Mars.”


Jun 23, 2019

You are the first person to step foot on Mars, what do you say?

“Oh. Hi, Mark.”


Jul 8, 2019

Why would consumers choose the Brave browser over Google Chrome?

Speed.

I’ve been using Brave for two weeks now. To say that Brave has powerful ad-blocking and tracker-prevention gives a false impression : That Brave is for people who don’t like ads and worry about privacy.

Most people grumble about these issues, but speed is what really matters. A second-long delay while browsing the web is a huge mental disruption. It’s as if you’re reading a book, flip a page, and the lights go out for one second.

Yea, it’s just a second. But you were reading. Caught up in a stream of thought.

Ads and trackers slow your browser down. Because they are communicating in this elaborate two-way chatter between your machine and various back-end servers.

Brave shuts that down and removes those delays. Here are my stats from 2 weeks of Brave :

Brave shows you this whenever you open a new tab. They’re proud of it.

With good reason, apparently. 51,000 ads !? Yup. Almost a thousand trackers? Mmhmm.

But look at the 44 minutes. You might think 44 minutes over two weeks is nice, sure. Not some epic breakthrough in productivity but impressive enough - now I can watch an extra Black Mirror episode.

But you shouldn’t think of it as a single block of time. Rather, break it down into one-second delays. You’re reading a book, flip a page, and the lights go out for a second.

Brave prevented 2,800 of those micro-blackouts.

Now, the analogy is a bit of a stretch. After all, there is always some delay when you load a new page.

So to state it more accurately, we might say that Brave cut the duration of 5,000 of those black-outs in half.

No matter how you parse this out, it becomes clear this is a Big Fucking Deal.

During the last 2 weeks, I also opted in to Brave’s ad program. Meaning I volunteer to allow Brave to serve up little, tweet-sized ads. These ads don’t interfere with content, they appear above the browser - no graphics, just text.

Brave is clever about not pushing your patience with this. It seems to sense when you’re busy. When I’m typing away like I am now, Brave never serves up an ad. It also will take long stretches of time where it shows no ads at all - so much so I have had to check that my ads were still activated.

I opted in for ads because of the other reward Brave offers: a cryptocurrency called BAT (Basic Attention Token).

In two weeks I accrued about 5 bucks worth. (Most of it was a random direct gift from Brave, which they do occasionally. But some from ad-watching.) My BAT fortune sits in a wallet I can check any time.

I can just hold it. Given historical explosions in value for certain cryptocurrencies, no telling how valuable it might become.

But I’ll probably use it to tip content-creators. Small operators on YouTube who don’t have millions of subscribers, but who work hard to cover less popular subjects like astronomy. Or who got demonetized for political reasons. That sort of thing.

Brave has enrolled many thousands of content-creators thus far (including some major news outlets), but most small-time creators aren’t signed up yet. (For recent stats see Monitoring Brave Browser adoption )

So I’m going to hold these BAT and hand them out as my favorite channels enroll.

I must say, being empowered to directly support media that I love, using money I earned by not looking at embedded ads - merely tolerating unobtrusive, occasional ‘ad-tweets’ - feels pretty good.

And this post only took about 20 minutes to write. That leaves 24.

I think I’ll watch South Park …

This is a cross-post from Christopher Reiss's answer to What kind of rewards have you received from using the Brave Browser?, a rare case where the questions differ but the answer applies equally.


Jul 9, 2019

Do I need a GPU to learn deep learning?

Almost always. “Deep Learning” implies many hidden layers of a neural net, which means many trillions of calculations.

But you don’t need to buy a GPU.

Both Kaggle and Colab provide free cloud-GPU time to enable people to learn, research and experiment.

Free as in nothing. No credit card required. Both companies get huge karma points for bringing this powerful technology to anyone on Earth with an internet connection free of charge.

Now, it’s not quite as good as having your own GPU. You can’t debug nearly as well, and there are other impediments.

So the terrain is rockier, but open to your first steps.


Jul 9, 2019

I asked, "Why Americans don't understand that all dominant empires come to and end?" and my question was deleted? What is the problem? This is an important question and needs to be answered.

It contains two assumptions : That all dominant empires end, and that Americans don’t know that.

It also appears to be entirely rhetorical, you seem to wish to make a statement rather than seek information.

Whether the assumptions are true or the rhetorical point is valid is immaterial; any assumptions (that aren’t self-evident) should be asked, not assumed.

And any point you wish to make is best done as an Answer, not a Question. Or, probably, as a blog post somewhere else.

Pro-tip : You could rephrase it as : Will the American empire come to an end, as other empires have done in the past? If so, do Americans realize it?

Then you can answer it, and sound off all you want.


Jul 10, 2019

My boyfriend is going to propose to me. How should I reject him without hurting him because I only like him as my boyfriend, not as my husband?

Tell him now.


Jul 11, 2019

What's useful - but only if you are stupid?

A moose catapult.


Jul 13, 2019

Why isn't it valid to view the US Civil War being about the liberty of each state towards self-determination versus centralized power as opposed to slavery?

It really doesn’t take deep research to see what the US Civil War was about.

Each Southern state gave their reasons in various Declarations of Causes which induce and justify Secession (The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States).

You don’t even have to read them. Just count the times the word ‘slavery’ is mentioned.

Georgia : Slavery is mentioned 35 times in just 3 pages (!)

Mississippi : 7 times in one page.

South Carolina : 17 times.

Texas : 21 times.

Viginia : Just once in a brief declaration.

In total, their combined declarations mention slavery over eighty times.

A great deal of ink was expended to make excruciatingly clear that this war was about slavery, slavery, eighty times over slavery.


Jul 13, 2019

Why does my Smok Novo taste like paper?

The wicking material in the pod is burning (probably cotton).

Your pod either went dry or maybe its coil burnt out.

Chuck the pod, fill a new one, give it a good long time to soak and you shd be good to go …


Jul 14, 2019

Why is it very hard for privileged people to admit they are privileged?

As you can tell from the abundant and excellent other answers, most people don’t accept the language of ‘privilege’.

I’d like to point out something else, as well. The form of your question : “Why is it very hard for privileged people to admit they are privileged?”

You didn’t ask if people disagreed. Or why. Rather, you framed the question in such a way that your privilege-perspective is absolute truth.

If someone doesn’t agree, they are having trouble. It is very hard for them. In short, they have failed.

This is a ploy typically employed by totalitarian communist states. It’s an evasion that is both lazy and ignorant. A tactic that avoids the work of articulating a moral defense by simply assuming from the outset that you are in the right, and any dissension is a failing that requires more effort or education on the dissenter’s part.

This is blindness. You can’t even be said to truly believe your own doctrine because you’ve shown no effort to consider it critically, nor defend it rationally. You’re engaged in tribal repetition no different than “Sieg Heil!” and “Smash the four olds!”.

Such blindness is the most dangerous force in the world.

Each of us has an urgent moral obligation to consider the radical proposition that we are wrong.


Jul 15, 2019

In a machine learning project, how do you achieve evaluation of the model based on chosen metrics?

TLDR; Use k-fold validation (A Gentle Introduction to k-fold Cross-Validation).

The simple (and slightly dangerous) way is to set aside, say, 10% of the data for testing. That’s the Validation Set and it’s critical that your model never sees any of that data during the training phase.

So you train your model, and then run the model on the Validation Set. Since that validation set has the ‘answers’ (whatever target you are interested in), you can calculate your desired metric (Confusion Matrix, Accuracy, F1-Score, Area-Under-Curve, etc.)

Such metrics are already implemented for you and can be found in the ubiquitous sklearn.metrics module.

Be careful about ‘leaks’. There are a lot of ways that information about your validation set can sneak into your training set. This might artificially raise your score and send you down a blind alley under the illusion that you’ve got an Amazing Approach.

For example, say you’re doing text analysis. You calculate word-counts for your entire bunch of training data, but you do it prior to snipping off your validation set.

Your model could now deduce the exact word counts of your validation set during its training phrase - when it’s supposed to have no knowledge of the validation data. Leaks can be sneaky like this. (This example is actually common practice; while it has little effect for models currently en vogue, the potential to derail experimental models often goes unnoticed.)

I said at the outset that this mode of validation is slightly dangerous; the validation set you chose may be an outlier. This is a concern when rare features of the data matter a lot. For example, if you are doing binary classification where the positive set occurs 0.1 % of the time.

The safest and most thorough approach is k-fold validation, A Gentle Introduction to k-fold Cross-Validation considered the gold standard of validation. It does the technique described above, but repeatedly, for a number (usually 10) of validation sets drawn from the training data. This is a slow process, so people usually delay this step so they can move quickly while experimenting with architecture and hyper-parameters.


Jul 15, 2019

Many people think that Marx's theory is wrong, but why is he still so influential?

I think Marx just went a little too far.

His theoretical treatise - where he is describing the worker in the industrial age - is a profound and pristine analysis. He is absolutely right about how the worker - whose ancestors tilled a small plot of land to earn a living - now lives a life alienated from the work of his own hands, disconnected from the consumer he builds for, from the colleague he works with, and the company which employs him.

As a philosopher, Marx builds perhaps the most thorough, unassailable, and morally urgent thesis ever.

Where Marx gets into trouble is when he passes from philosopher to prognosticator. Having precisely and profoundly identified the problem, he then makes the mistake of predicting the inevitable outcome.

He claims that the workers will - necessarily - rise up and violently overthrow their overlords. Further, he states they will form a non-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat (worker). Finally, he claims the dictatorship will wither away (along with all other forms of government and indeed the nation-state itself.) The workers, freed at last from their shackles, will have no need of flags or nations.

Marx is as bad a prognosticator as he is a good philosopher. He’s wrong at every stage, as the 20th century so clearly bears out.

The dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t fade away, or loosen its grip. It turns out that capitalism doesn’t create a lust for power - that is an inherent human frailty. Power corrupts and does so absolutely. Each and every communist government is a painful example of this dynamic. There is simply no historical exception.

The workers in industrial societies will not violently rise up against the wealthy. The wealthy in industrial societies realize that in order to be safe in their possessions - and to have consumers to sell to - wages must rise and taxes must redistribute much of the income. Communist revolutions occurred in agrarian - not industrial - societies. In World War II, industrial workers rose up not against their oppressors, but against each other as capitalist democracies united to nearly obliterate the threat of fascism.

Marx has perfectly nailed the problem.

And absolutely fucked up the solution.


Jul 16, 2019

Why are off-by-one errors common in programming?

The central problem, I think, is that humans live in a continuous world. We never directly experience discrete phemonema.

Consider these bricks, a metaphor for an array in programming :

If I ask you to show me the yellow brick, you’ll point to it. Here’s the thing though - you will point to the center of it.

Even though we considering the brick as a single, discrete object - our mental model of it is continuous. It has width along which to slide our finger. In which we come to the center.

But discrete things - like an array - don’t work like that. In the array, the brick has no width. You can’t move within it. You’re either in or out of it - nothing more.

It’s impossible to visualize, but if the wall were a true representation of an array, it would be a sequence of bricks and gaps, all with zero width.

Such an abstraction does strange things. The sequence always begins with a brick and ends with a brick - never a gap. Delete the last brick and the last gap also vanishes. Delete a middle brick and either its left- or right-gap disappears (it’s ambiguous as to which - either one will do.)

A brick can never follow another brick. Same for gaps. Bricks and gaps must take turns.

The gaps are just as important as the bricks and actually have more complex behavior.

Our intuition with real life, continuous objects soon fails us and we forget to (sorry) “mind the gap”.

And then we’re off by one.


Jul 18, 2019

While watching a movie at the theater, what movie scene made the whole theater gasp?

It’s the summer of ‘77. There’s been buzz for months about some huge, spectacular sci-fi in the works called Star Wars.

A lot of sci-fi movies had already been made at this point. The outer space scenes required - well, a hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief.

It was pretty camp and cheesy. Often rockets - in the vacuum of space - were portrayed (smoke and all) with something like a tiki torch. You could easily see they were pocket-sized models held up by wire.

George Lucas had a fresh insight as to how to really put the viewer into outer space. Space is not a theatre stage, not people and objects running around at a fixed distance. Space is all around you : above, below, behind, to both sides and forward.

Space is immersive.

He shot the film from this fresh perspective. And it wasn’t just the visuals, he was outrageously insistent about the sound.

Lucas used Dolby which enabled an early version of surround sound. And he insisted that speakers in the rear of the theatre be used. If you don’t have rear speakers : Fuck you, you can’t play the movie. Cinemas across the country scrambled to upgrade their sound systems.

So my Dad takes me to see it in May of 77. I think the ticket was like a buck fifty.

First comes the scrolling text, “A long long time ago, in a Galaxy far far away …”.
Only it’s not scrolling up and down, it’s receding into the distance using perspective.

Lucas is signalling : This world is not flat.

The text fades, leaving only a steady field of stars.

Next we pan down slightly to the surface of a planet. A sight already made familiar by NASA.

Now Lucas teases us. The usual pocket-sized space ship flies by, just like all the other movies.

Then - something audiences had never heard before. A deep, deep rumble coming from behind the theatre.

Like a gravel truck is plowing through the theatre entrance. Eyes dart back, then forward again.

It’s a ship. No, not a ship.

An Imperial Star Destroyer.

It doesn’t so much arrive, it only begins. As if it’s skimming the ceiling of the theatre, the boom of its engines rush forward as the middle speakers take over.

It keeps coming and coming, revealing an intricate and utterly colossal city-in-flight. As it takes over the screen the roar floods your senses.

There’s no suspension of disbelief here. It’s overwhelmed awe.

The audience erupted in gasps, “Whoaaaaahhh!”, “Ohhh my GOD” and so on as people beheld the biggest, most powerful thing they had ever seen. You could hear popcorn and drinks dropping as some people actually stood up.

I wish the word ‘epic’ hadn’t been dimmed by recent over-use. Because - for me - in a movie theatre a long, long time ago in a town far, far away - that was fucking epic.

Dum. Dum. Da-da Dum. Dum.

(The effect is totally lost on the small screen, but the clip gives some idea …)


Jul 18, 2019

What is the funniest prank?

There is, and can only ever be, one. A prank to rule them all, a prank for the ages.

Take a minute for this. Clear your mind.

It’s 1953, and General Dwight Eisenhower was just elected President. The Russians just detonated their first atomic bomb, Senator McCarthy has been elected to a second term. The American witch-hunt for “reds under the bed” - communists embedded into American society - is gathering strength.

Amidst all this national angst, fear and dread - a few kids at Harvard are determined to have fun anyway.

Two rival student newspapers, the Crimson and the Lampoon, are having an escalating prank-war.

The Crimson steals the ‘ibis’ - this dome-ish ornament with a bird on it - that sits atop Lampoon headquarters. One morning, it’s just been disassembled somehow and is gone.

The Lampoon is backed into a corner. How are they going to top this? How the hell did Crimson got up there? It’s right in view of the dorm room of the Lampoon’s president, John Updike. (Yes, that John Updike.) How’d nobody see them do it?

An idea strikes. The Lampoon will kidnap the Crimson’s president and whisk him away.

So they do that, and end up in Manhattan where police inform them that they can’t kidnap people just because it’s funny. They release the Crimson president and ask for their ibis back.

And what happens next is the stroke of genius that soars above the mortal world and takes its eternal place in the heavens, like the North Star, to forever shine, inspire, and guide us :

The Crimson explains they no longer have the ibis. They no longer have it …

.

.

but they know where it is …

.

.

.

because …

.

.

.

They donated it to the Soviet Union.

-fin-

History of Pranks at Harvard


Jul 21, 2019

Why can't variable names start with a number in Python or C?

I’m not aware of any language which allows variables to start with a number.

There’s no technical reason such a syntax couldn’t be made. The reason is historical.

It saves the parser a lot of work if the first character after a white-space reveals a great deal about what comes next.

If it’s a number, in Python say, then it has to be literal numeric (like 3.7). If it’s a alphabetic (a-z), then it’s an identifier. Could be a variable, function, a keyword like for, lots of things - but it’s an identifier. If it’s a ‘(‘ then what follows is either a tuple or arithmetical/boolean expression.

And so on. The parser can branch on the first character and now has a very good idea of what comes next (especially important for catching syntax errors.)

Allowing a digit to be the first character of a variable would cause the parser to gain almost no information at the first character, and would complicate parsing.

This mattered when C was developed in the 60’s. Now - really - the extra steps would be a trivial impediment to speed.

But the tradition of not starting with a digit is now engrained deeply into programming culture, and breaking with this tradition would look very strange to people.

Also, it can be argued that people are similar to compilers. A human can read more easily if the first character gives away a lot of information.


Jul 21, 2019

Which particular battle did Nazi Germany lose that was crucial and dealt an immense blow to Hitler's plans to win the war?

The failure at Stalingrad is generally considered to be the turning point of the War. (Goring stated at the Nuremberg trials (off the court record) that it was at this point Hitler became erratic, paranoid and desperate.)

The Nazis were counting on this victory in order to gain the oil from farther down the Volga River. The Werrmacht was choking for lack of fuel.

It was also their first total defeat, and shattered the myth of the Ubermensch (the Slavs were considered to be inferior to, say, the French who had fallen quickly.)

The Nazis didn’t just lose this battle, they got bogged down in it long enough for a massive resupply of fresh Soviet troops , trained for winter warfare in Siberia (and seriously pissed off), to be made ready and brought to bear.

Once these arrived, and the front began moving back West, it didn’t stop until the Soviets raised their flag over Berlin.

Another candidate is the unthinkably immense tank battle at Kursk. The Nazis and Soviets basically went all-or-nothing in the largest mechanized battle in history. The losses in men and materiel were just irrecoverable to the Nazis, now desperately low on fuel, and enduring heavy bombing of their industry back home.


Jul 22, 2019

How do I go about buying $100 million worth of bitcoin?

Retroactively.


Jul 22, 2019

Do you believe God Himself will step in if a country or an alliance of countries attack Israel?

Israel has nuclear weapons.

It’s the attackers who would need Divine intervention.


Jul 24, 2019

What do you know that most people don’t?

If you come to visit Boston, you’ll likely end up in Copley Square where the Prudential shopping complex is.

And once there, there’s a good chance you’ll want to try Legal Seafood. You can’t miss it - just walk in the front entrance of The Pru, up the escalator and Legal is just on your left.

It’s always packed; the atmosphere is loud and cramped.

Stay hungry but keep walking. All the way through. Follow signs for the Copley, not Prudential shopping complex.

You will come to a pedestrian sky-walk over a busy street - it’s not far now.

Within this sister complex is a second Legal Seafood. It’s enormous, with huge windows giving a stunning view of the Back Bay. It’s spacious and relaxed and often there is no wait.

The first one has intercepted the tourists. The second is for locals and guests of the Copley hotel.

Now you’re Boston-ing like a native.


Jul 25, 2019

I'm thinking of getting into Linux. I was a Microsoft programmer using Visual Studio and VB. Are all Linux OS the same like Ubuntu, RedHat, etc? What OS should I use on my development PC?

Welcome!

When starting out, it pays to go where the biggest community is. Problems get fixed faster, questions you might have are most likely to already have been asked, and answered, and so on.

The big tent is Ubuntu. Within that tent, there are some sub-choices, mainly to do with the graphical widowing layer.

Kubuntu serves up windows using KDE (K desktop environment.) It’s a feature-rich desktop that’s popular with developers in particular.

Mint is another Ubuntu flavor which aims to offer a simple UI that is closer to Windows. It even offers a System Restore capability - something often missing on other Linuxen.

Lubuntu, for Light Ubuntu, can run on the lowest end notebook.

And of course, there’s just plain old Ubuntu, which you can’t go wrong with.


Jul 26, 2019

For what reason are some programmers against using OOP in software development?

There are far more complete and cogent indictments of OOP than i can muster here, but here’s my post-it note version :

Nobody can live without classes and objects. Of course they’re good.

The problem with OOP is not the paradigm but with its fanatics. They want objects everywhere, for everything, all the time.

Result : In the language Smalltalk, you don’t say 2+2. You send the ‘2’ object a ‘+2’ message.

Come on.


Jul 27, 2019

Does Area 51 have aliens inside it?

Area 51 is quite literally - and not ‘literally’ like everyone uses it these days as in ‘almost literally’ - rather: Actually, precisely, absolutely the last goddamn place on earth the US Government would stash dead aliens is Area 51.

Because everyone has heard the rumor that Area 51 has aliens in it. The North Pole, the White House basement, a goddamn Denny’s would serve as a more secure hiding place.


Jul 27, 2019

As stupid as it sounds, how would the US military react if there were 120,000 civilians storming into Area 51? They can't shoot/arrest them all.

They can't shoot/arrest them all.”

You bet your ass they can.

A large, sudden assault on a top-secret facility is an exercise they train for. Make no mistake: they will hold their ground if it means firing full-automatic into a crowd. (To say nothing of the mines and other automatic defenses.)

But it wouldn’t come to that. This approaching clown-mob would be intercepted with tear gas, flash grenades, rubber bullets (if any are around) and surrounded by electrified razor wire.

Unless they were foolish enough to rush in from all directions.

Cause of death : Suicide.


Jul 28, 2019

If being a developer is so stressful, why do people still do it?

It’s really not stressful. It’s stressful to the people the developer interacts with.

The developer is dealing with ‘ground truth’ : The cold and ruthless reality of silicon. This reality bends for no temper tantrum, urgent need, and impending calamity.

Way back in the 90’s, I was on a call with a client. They ran our web software, and had experienced a crash.

Them : “It’s fixed, but we need to write up what caused the failure.”

“Windows NT crashed. Blue screened. It does that sometimes.”

“What causes the crash?”

“Nobody knows. If they did Microsoft would pay them a zillion dollars. It’s just a flaw in the OS.”

“What steps can we take to prevent it?”

“Nothing. You can’t.”

That’s ridiculous! We need to take corrective action !”

“Just reboot the thing periodically, and provide fail-overs to reboot any server that blue-screens.”

“But - what guarantee can you give that this won’t happen again !?”

“I don’t think I’m coming across here. I am guaranteeing you - absolutely - that the server will crash at times impossible to predict. You’re not getting another answer of out of me no matter how long we talk. Your real problem is not that NT crashes, but apparently your employers don’t realize that. If I were you, I’d try to solve that second problem.”

He hung up positively fuming. For my part, I knew I couldn’t stop the NT Blue Screen of Death any more than Microsoft can. Contentedly I just went back to work.


Jul 29, 2019

If the universe is expanding, how do we assume it is infinite, since we have only observed a part of it?

Space is generally considered to be finite in volume, starting at 0 at the big bang, and expanding ever since. (And now we are pretty sure it’s expanding faster every second.)

The age-old question : “If it’s finite, what lies just beyond it?” is a badly formed question, but we can answer it if we fine-tune it a bit.

“If I take off from Earth in a rocket-ship of unlimited power, and fly in a straight line - do I hit a barrier or continue forever?”

The answer is : “Neither. You come back home.”

That’s right, bizarre as it sounds, you would see Earth receding in your rear-view mirror, travel billions of light-years, and Earth would magically appear coming toward you.

Now, theories vary as to the exact nature of the curvature so the actual result may be a little different. You may return to Earth with your Chirality - Wikipedia reversed, so that most people appear left-handed to you now and printed text appears backward.

Or you might not get reversed, or you might at up looping back to another galaxy or something.

Whether you do a perfect circle, or some bizarre spiral thing, whether you get flipped or not, you never exceed the distance R from Earth where R is the diameter of the universe.


Jul 31, 2019

How many professional programmers use regular expressions?

All of them. Every damn one, everywhere.

Regular Expressions is one of those devices which is so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it, but so powerful you can’t leave home without it.

Whether you are querying a database, scraping web data, or just trying to find a file whose name and location you forgot last month, RegExp is there.

Make peace with it. It’s OK to forget immediately the cryptic command you devise for the occasion, and to shield your gaze even while copy-pasting it around.

Regular Expressions are generally considered to be a “Write-only” language.


Aug 2, 2019

What are some good ideas that can save your life?

This is a tip from old Western movies, but it works.

If someone appears to be approaching you to to attack, pretend to adjust your shoe while grabbing a fistful of sand/dirt. (Or likewise if you have been already knocked to the ground.)

Throw the dirt into the attackers eyes, they will be blinded and will instinctively draw both hands to their face, giving you a chance to run away.


Aug 3, 2019

How do you do things that don't scale and "build a great product" at the same time in a startup? It's really confusing.

It’s about the order of things.

Don’t worry about scale at first. Put that off.

“Build a great product” is a little misleading. It’s really “build a good product, ship fast, listen to your customers and rapidly improve it (iterate).”

Your first goal is really to test the viability of your idea. Is there really a market for it? Since the answer to that is so critical, it’s the first thing you want to find out. So get the Minimal Viable Product (good, not great) out the door fast and go from there.

If nobody likes it, well - you saved a lot of time and can go do something else. If people do like it, they’re going to have lots of feedback.

Great. Now you’re moving.


Aug 3, 2019

How do I cure tourette syndrome?

There’s no cure, but I discovered a trick when I was a kid to eliminate the twitches and tics that are so common with Tourette’s.

I once posted my little discovery to an online forum, and 3 years later somebody replied, “This worked! I can’t thank you enough, this changed my life!”

Just last night I realized - “Now I’ve got like 15,000 Quora followers. Why don’t I use that microphone to maybe help somebody else like that?”

So here it is : Don’t try to stop the tic. You can’t. It’s like a circuit in your head, building energy that periodically needs release.

Move it instead. Choose a muscle that’s not visible, like your abdomen. Practice redirecting the twitch there.

If you’re like me, it only takes a day or so to learn and then you don’t have to think about it. The circuit is now rewired.

When I was a kid, I’d twitch my nose or rapidly blink my eyes every few seconds. Then I stumbled upon this trick.

It’s been 45 years and I still twitch just as often. But you could be sitting directly across from me and never notice it.

(And you can bounce a nickel off my abdomen!)

Good luck. (Seriously.)


Aug 3, 2019

Did you ever have an argument with your code?

Yes. And I’ve lost every damn one of them.

When you’re staring at your code and there is just no way, no way in hell it could be doing what it’s doing, the problem is not in the code but in the way you are thinking about the code.

In the days of radio, technicians called this a “short between the ears.” There is some assumption you are making, and you’re not aware you’re making it.


Aug 4, 2019

Can I learn machine learning in 1 week?

No.


Aug 4, 2019

How do I tell my parents that I know they put a camera in my room?

May I suggest a bit of sabotage? I mean - you may as well have a little fun with this.

The best form of sabotage is indirect. Sure, you could smash the thing with a hammer. And they lose a camera, and immediately understand why.

How much sweeter, how more delightful, to make them doubt their own sanity.

Grab some hair-spray. Enter your room with all the lights down, completely pitch dark. Give your eyes 5 minutes to adjust. If necessary, use some very dim source of light.

From a couple of feet away, spray into the camera. Very fine mist. Short burst. You don’t want to disable it, just to degrade the image quality so it is a little blurry.

Exit room. Return, turn on lights, and go about your business.

Repeat the next night. Leave a hair or something on the camera so you can see if they’ve been in to try to fix it.

You can either wait for them to clean it themselves, or grab it yourself (in the dark again) and clean the lense with nail polish remover.

OK, next use your phone or iPad to take a picture from the vantage point of the camera (careful, you’ll need to obscure the camera temporarily in a way that looks natural.)

Now doctor the photo. Make the image all red or something with a still-frame of you walking across.

Put the phone/ipad in front of the camera so that’s what it sees. Or you can print the thing and use paper. Whatever.

Leave it that way all night. In the morning remove the fake view. But do it early, before first light. And place the hair.

Notice if they came to tinker with or replace the camera. Keep this up for a while, so they’ve expended a great deal of effort trying to debug their camera.

When the time feels right - deploy the grand finale :

Get some superglue. Mix sand into it. Place a big glob of it directly onto the lense.

And superglue the camera in place so they need an ice pick to move it.


Aug 5, 2019

My 12-year-old has a genius IQ. What is the best way to enable him to reach his potential?

I had a strong urge to write this anonymously, but changed my mind. My reasons for this might become clear as you read on.

I was a kid like that. I’m speaking from my own personal experience, which won’t necessarily apply to everyone, but which I’ve seen does generalize pretty broadly to others.

Most of this is counter-intuitive. The direct opposite of your natural instincts. Here goes :

Don’t mention IQ again. Gifted kids (and adults) don’t think much of IQ tests, despite their high score. Filling in bubbles on a standard test in order to be placed on a bell curve is an artificial, competitive exercise that somebody else contrived. We don’t like it, don’t want to hear about it.

Same with the word ‘genius’. The psychometric researchers arbitrarily defined this as being in the top 0.4% of IQ scores. They sure are confident about that test. We’re not. Genius is about the ability to radically impact the world in an unexpected way : Mozart was a genius because he created music of a structure so complex that few composers would attempt it, yet so harmonious that the result seems inevitable, almost obvious. Hemingway changed the way people write. Steve Jobs changed the way people connect to computers. Monet rebelled against realism. Picasso against perspective. Don’t call us ‘genius’ because of a bubble test. Let’s just call your kid ‘gifted’.

Give them a wide berth. Gifted kids are explorers. Self-directed. They will explore interests like crazy, plunging into areas like astronomy, art, math. They might do weird stuff like go into the woods and try to create stone-age tools like our ancestors did.

Embrace the chaos. They may become obsessed with photosynthesis for 3 months, growing their own plants in a terrarium, and suddenly lose interest entirely. Or they may start a musical instrument for a while and just drop it. That’s OK. An explorer can’t stay long at each location they visit. They have to move on to find new places.

Brace for impact. Failure is a big part of this - gifted kids fail more often and more spectacularly than normal. Their machines may blow up, they may flunk a class, ruin the carpet, or piss off the neighbors.

Stay out of their way, but follow close behind to provide material support. Say they get interested in astronomy. Get them a telescope. But keep in mind, as an explorer, they might drop this interest soon. So buy an inexpensive, used telescope you can easily resell on ebay. Same for musical instruments and other such enabling devices. Let the kid know it’s not a big deal to move on.

Don’t fantasize about their future. Don’t become attached to the notion they will be a great physicist or surgeon or anything like that. Don’t treat them as if theirs is a high and lonely destiny atop some mountain you can already see.

Don’t worry that they’ll never stick to anything long enough to get good at it. They will begin to create and to practice in time, as they discover the things they shine most at. When they do, they may dive into it with such intensity that you actually need to pump the brakes a bit for the sake of health and balance.

These are explorers. They cannot be otherwise. Support their exploring, and let them know that it’s not their difference from others that defines them, but rather all the places they will go.

Added : A couple of weeks later I realized I was being too slippery on the matter of IQ. The question asks about a kid with a high score, I respond by bashing the notion of IQ as meaningless, and then go on to list all these traits to likely expect in a person with high IQ.

That’s pretty mixed up, let me try to clarify : The traits I list, of being a self-directed learner, prone to originality, and so on are what really define a ‘gifted’ kid. They tend to end up in areas like research, the arts, and often go through multiple distinct careers in their lives.

IQ and other standard tests detect about half these kids in my experience, and give false positives about half the time as well. That is : Half the kids with high IQ aren’t gifted, and half the gifted kids don’t have high IQ.

It’s really the traits I’ve listed that act as a reasonable ‘diagnostic’ tool.

So. Your kid came home with a high IQ score. Great. There’s about a 50% chance they’re ‘gifted’. Otherwise they are just good at IQ tests.

Which is just fine. You really don’t want a ‘gifted’ kid to be a surgeon or a lawyer. Their wild and unkempt psyches are fairly hazardous in such a capacity.

Or, your kid came home with a normal score. S/he could still be gifted.


Aug 6, 2019

How can I enter a function in Python when the function is declared by the user itself?

That sort of thing is usually referred to as a callback.

In Python you’re in luck, because functions are first class objects. Meaning you can toss them around like, say, a string or a float and the sensible thing happens.

In the callback pattern, the user registers their function with your library by calling a registration-function you define like this:

Your code :

user_callback_func = None

def register_callback(f) :

global user_callback_func

user_callback_func = f

End-user’s code :

def my_callback(arg1) :

print("This is my callback, check it out.", arg1)

register_callback(my_callback)

Now the user’s function is held in user_callback_func, which in this example has global scope. Elsewhere in your back-end code, you can now invoke that code in the natural way :

Your code :

user_callback_func(5)

Notice that you need to specify to the end-user the callback function’s signature - that is, the order, type, and meaning of the arguments. Extra credit for checking that the function has all these when register_callback is invoked.

Another approach to this, considered more elegant by OOP enthusiasts, is to use inheritance - which is a topic for another day.


Aug 7, 2019

What dire warning did masses of people ignore?

In 1901, at the dawn of a new century, Winston Churchill foretold a terrible future :

In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury—a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.
Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
Winston Churchill, May 13, 1901. House of Commons

Aug 8, 2019

Is \sqrt[2]{x}^{{{{{{\sqrt[2]{x}}^{\sqrt[2]{x}}}^{\sqrt[2]{x}}}^{\sqrt[2]{x}}}^{\sqrt[2]{x}}}^\cdots}=2x true?

It looks like it has a solution, as Alexey Godin suggests. Let’s see if we can learn more about it.

Let’s substitute y=x^{2} .

Now we can write the simpler

y^{y^{y ...}} = 2 \sqrt{y}

Whenever I see an infinite series like this, I use a trick I call the ‘infinite shift’. Observe that :

If S=y^{y^{y ...}} , then S=y^{S} .

Substituting 2 \sqrt{y} for S yields

y^{2\sqrt{y}} = 2\sqrt{y} . Now substitute x^{2} back for y,

(x^2)^{2x} = 2 x

\boxed{x^{4 x}=2 x}

Now, we have to be careful because we assumed a solution exists. I’ll return to that in a moment.

I don’t see any way to write a closed form expression for x. But we can use a variety of iterative techniques to get a more precise view of x. I omit those details, but here it is :

x = 1.20008348425 … (precise to all digits shown) and another one at x=0.15655 ….

(Either Alexey Godin or I seem to be off somewhere in our calculations. He gets a solution near 0.346...)

Are these the only two (Real) solutions? Do they both check out as solutions? (They are suspect because we didn’t prove our assumption that some solution exists.)

How many roots exist in the Complex plane?


Aug 9, 2019

What is the best single-paneled comic you've ever seen?

The life of a journalist :


Aug 9, 2019

Can I see the assembly code for every program even though they are closed source if every instruction is converted to binary anyways?

Sure can. Just take the binary executable and feed it into a Disassembler - Wikipedia .

You won’t get pretty variable names and such, but you can read the assembly.

This is one way that hackers find exploits in closed-source applications.


Aug 9, 2019

What is the worst programming bug in history?

I nominate the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a weather satellite that was going to keep orbiting mars, and send back global weather maps to scientists on Earth.

How cool would that have been? It was built at a cost of $125 Million, plus whatever it costs to launch it out there.

As it approached Mars, the onboard computer tried to fire thrusters to steer the thing into stable orbit.

But one part of the software was indicating pounds, while another part mistook the data to be kilograms.

The machine careened straight into Mar’s atmosphere and burned up.


Aug 10, 2019

Why did the creator of C++ invent it if it is a terrible language?

C++ is a ‘living language’. Since its early days as a primitive C macro-assembler, it’s been in fervent use by a massive swath of the global population.

The English you are now reading bears the scars of history. It’s full of German due to the invasion of the Saxons. Of Latin due to the invasion of the Normans and the later rise of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s got bits of all the Romance Languages due to vigorous trade across the Channel.

An English sentence is a time capsule with roots as far back as Ancient Greece.

C++ is like that. It has no single author like Bjarne Stroustrup. Countless influences went into building C (including the whole Unix and embedded software community). Then wars broke out as software began to strain under its own complexity : MIT held fast to Functional Programming and Lisp while Berkeley embraced Object Oriented Programming, adding objects to C to make C++.

C++ itself bifurcated into dialects (and Objective-C) as C++ took over the GUI and desktop application market (including the Web Browser.) It was exiled from its Unix homeland however; Unix held fast to pure C and purged the heretic from its domain. But C++ spread to other OS’s like Windows and MacOS.

Lisp thrived for decades among researchers, spawning new descendants like Scheme and maintaining its defiance against OOP as long as it could. But OOP’s global dominance threatened Lisp with extinction, and Lisp finally relented in the form of CLOS - the Common Lisp Object System. To this day, they refuse to call it “Object Oriented Lisp”. Rather, it is the facility for objects that exists within Common Lisp. Sort of like “The United States of America”, it’s the kind of conflicted parlance that arises from tense compromise.

All the while new colonies were established far from these two perennial adversaries, drawing heavily from the traditions of both empires : Java, Eiffel, BASIC, Python and so on.

As in history and natural language, there have been attempts to design a language free from history. A perfect reboot.

Much as people have often set foot on new lands and proclaimed with all earnestness that - this time - we’ll get it perfect. We know how societies go wrong and how much suffering results. We’ll use that experience to finally get it right.

We do see pristine, nearly perfect programming languages like Smalltalk. They do work out , but remain small islands, never making much impact on the world. Wonderful places to visit, that’s all.

A few really succeed though. These are never purely OOP or Functional, but a pragmatic hybrid of both. But they still originate from a single, cohesive and consistent design. And when they do succeed - a funny thing happens. War immediately erupts. Java bifurcates into Java and JavaScript. Microsoft tries to invade JavaScript and renames a variant JScript.

Cesare di Bonesana Beccaria said “Happy is the nation without a history.” But unless such a nation remains empty, this ahistorical bliss won’t last even a year.

We can define a perfect language like Esperanto. We could even conquer a nation and force the inhabitants to speak it.

But we can’t make it thrive. Our experiment in forced evolution would die out from neglect or obliteration at the hands of its far greater and more powerful adversaries, who bear the battle-scars of centuries.

Good programming languages aren’t good because their designs are perfect. They are good because they survive. It’s been said that “Perfect is the enemy of good.”

Perfect is also the enemy of living. The languages we all use are deeply imperfect. And the perfect ones are dead.


Aug 10, 2019

Why makes GPUs good for AI training?

Unlike a regular CPU, a GPU has hundreds of thousands or cores. That is, a GPU has many CPU’s - only much simpler.

When you’re playing Call Of Duty (or whatever the kids are playing these days), the GPU is rendering a bazillion 3-D objects on your screen. Each object is modeled mathematically by a bunch of triangles, which are projected in real time onto the viewing plane (your screen).

This is not a complex calculation, but it has to happen very, very fast to give you smooth game-play. So the GPU is made of a large collection of rather dumb CPU’s which have just the minimal power and memory to handle the triangles. Since each triangle calculation usually doesn’t affect another triangle, the triangles can be divvied up and handled en masse by all those cores simultaneously. This parallelism is behind the dazzling realism of your favorite game.

Thanks be to gamers who dumped billions of dollars into the GPU industry, spawning innovation and competition which made them ever more powerful. (And cryptocoin miners as well.)

It’s a happy accident that these little processors are also quite capable of processing large matrix operations - the type that crop up in Linear Algebra. That huge calculation can also be broken up and farmed out to all these dumb processors.

Neural Networks do almost nothing but matrix multiplication. So the GPU is re-purposed for this work, and becomes a Massively Parallel Processor (MPP).

I have a pretty nice NVidia graphics card on my work machine that I use as an MPP. I’m told it produces really stunning 3D graphics when used for gaming.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never plugged it into a monitor.


Aug 12, 2019

What do left leaning Quorans think about Jordan Peterson?

Generally, I find that he speaks the truth in interviews and podcasts.

For example, he asserts that universities must not compel staff to use personal pronouns aside from ‘he’ and ‘she’.

I think that this is true, not in a small way, but a big way : The majority of American Democrats agree with Jordan. (Can we get a poll, please?) So do practically all Republicans. And in ten years, even the current proponents of such policies will find their prior stance embarrassing to the point that they can only say, “My heart was in the right place, anyway.”

In a world gone slightly mad, Peterson is speaking a truth that most of us recognize, and eventually everyone will return to.

That’s Jordan Peterson - on camera, anyway.

But I worry quite seriously about Peterson’s mental health. In his books he goes off the rails and devolves into true sexist bigotry :

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards.
— 12 Rules for Life : An Antidote to Chaos

I have no idea what he’s trying to say here, but I’m certain there’s a better way to say it. To equate the feminine with ‘chaos’ is to engage in the same gender-slandering as the term ‘toxic masculinity’, which he condemns with such vehemence.

He also appears deeply depressed. I have never seen him laugh. I’ve never seen him smile. He always looks brooding and miserable.

Jordan : Take a break. Get away. Social media creates the illusion that the world has bifurcated into two polarized, irreconcilable camps.

The fact is 90% of humans find the whole thing ridiculous and don’t give a shit either way.

Epilogue : Since this post, Peterson announced he has entered treatment for over-use of klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug which can cause/aggravate depression. A speedy recovery to you, sir.


Aug 12, 2019

Why are recursive relationships bad? How do you resolve them?

The primary problem with recursive relationships is covered in full detail in my Quora answer here : Christopher Reiss's answer to Why are recursive relationships bad? How do you resolve them?


Aug 12, 2019

Which of the following statements is true about recursion, ‘recursive functions can hog a lot of memory and cause system crashes’ or ‘all Python functions are recursive in nature’?

*Sigh* at posting test questions to Quora.


Aug 12, 2019

Why do I keep finding indifferent British people on Quora?

Here in the US, many of us admire British ‘indifference’. We see it more as being ‘unflappable’.

You can’t upset these people. You can literally drop bombs on them - and they make light of it and just carry on. During the Blitz, images like this from the British press drove Hitler up the freakin’ wall :

“Try our famous high explosive haircuts!”

“Mind the bomb now, children …”

“Good morning!”

“You bloody well missed my teacup!”

Nothing demoralizes your enemies more than a stiff upper-lip, and a shrug which proclaims “Let them do their worst. We shall do our best.”


Aug 12, 2019

Could Trump pass a lie detector test?

He wouldn’t pass a Turing Test.


Aug 14, 2019

What is your opinion on Hong Kong's Sinophobia by some parts of the people?

I take it you mean, “What is the opinion on Hong Kong’s sinophobia by people in other parts of the world?”

As an American, as a child of the Cold War, and as a classic liberal :

The term X-phobia is an attempt to bury a political stance without stating your reasons. A phobia is an irrational fear. You’ve assumed the other side is irrational (and fearful) yet offered no proof.

China is a communist dictatorship whose ‘elections’ are for show; no real challenge to central state power would ever be allowed on the ballot.

So I support people in Hong Kong and anywhere else in their resistance to a government not arising from the consent of the governed. From free and fair elections.

And I remember Tiananmen Square.


Aug 14, 2019

As a supporter of the Democratic Party, what makes you roll your eyes every time you hear it?

I’m going to swim upstream here. I roll my eyes at my own Democratic party these days. We’re not exactly on a winning streak, yanno guys. Here’s a few gems :

“Check your privilege!”

“The wage gap!”

“Toxic masculinity!”

“Fascism! Racist!”

Don’t get me started, I could go all day. Basically, all the Republicans have to do to win the next election is to throw covert support to the neo-leftist, identity-obsessed elements of the Democratic party.

We probably need to lose another presidential election before we get back to our roots - which in essence was one of inclusion. (For those too young to remember, inclusion means that gay and straight people treat each other as equals, as do black, white and brown people, as well as men, women, and everything in between. Equals don’t scream at each other about their differences. [This should fall into the category of ‘duh’, I know.])


Aug 14, 2019

Why do vapers refuse to accept that vaping is bad for them? When every year more and more studies explain that it is harmful.

We’re ex-smokers.

I would never encourage a non-smoker to try vaping. But my doctor enthusiastically embraced my switching to e-cigs. After a year of vaping, he listened to my breathing with a stethoscope, he slapped me on the back and said, “You’re clear! First time I’ve written that in your chart. Keep it up.”

Vaping is saving millions of lives of smokers who just could not quit.


Aug 14, 2019

Are there any vape liquids that you like to mix together?

Yes, I mix all my own flavors. I get the flavor extracts from myfreedomsmokes dot com : Electronic Cigarettes | E-Liquids .

I add the flavors to an unflavored nicotine VG+PG base.

My two favorites are a banana/vanilla/coconut and a fruit/mint mix. PM me if you want exact recipes!


Aug 14, 2019

Why has my JUUL started to continue heating the pod after I hit it as if I am still hitting it? Is my JUUL beginning to break?

Yea, I’d toss that thing out immediately. While the actual risk is very low - the coil would probably burn out or something else first - lithium ion batteries can blow up if the circuitry that keeps them within certain operational limits goes haywire. Once they get over a certain temperature, they experience ‘thermal runaway’ which you can youtube if you want a fireworks show.

But first chuck that thing before it asplodes.


Aug 16, 2019

What were the most accurate predictions of all time?

Meet professor Alan Lichtman of American University in Washington, DC.

He has a mathematical model for Presidential elections. It ignores polls entirely, and focuses only on long-term trends of the economy and other underlying cycles of politics and culture.

He predicted Trump’s win in 2016. And both Obama victories. And both W Bush’s **. And both Clinton’s, Bush Sr., and Reagan’s second term (his first prediction.)

Nine times in a row. He’s never been wrong.

He has made no official prediction for 2020 yet, but claims that Democrats will win the next election if and only if they begin formal impeachment proceedings against Trump - even if it dies in the Senate.

** Technically, Lichtman was wrong about 2000 where he predicted a win for Gore. Many give him a pass on that, since that race was so close the Supreme Court had to intervene, and since Gore won the popular vote.


Aug 16, 2019

How can I know the application that created/updated a file in Linux?

That information isn’t recorded in the file system at all.


Aug 17, 2019

Are AMD GPU's good for data science?

They’re fine because they support OpenCL.

But in my view NVidia is preferable; it is the ‘default’ for Machine Learning frameworks (using NVidia’s proprietary CUDA.) Developers target NVidia first and AMD second.

So NVidia will be a less bumpy ride.


Aug 18, 2019

When did the German people start to realize Hitler was not their savior?

There were lots of sign-posts. Many people realized it right away, when the universities began to purge themselves of Jews and so forth.

Others saw it when Poland was first invaded, inducing France and Britain to declare war.

But if I had to pick a single event on a single day - it would be Jan 30, 1943.

It’s the tenth anniversary of the Nazi rise to power, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

The head of the Luftwaffe (air force), Hermann Göring, is going to give a speech commemorating the first decade of the Thousand Year Reich. The speech is to be given after a parade and amid great pageantry from the proud capitol of Berlin.

The sky is clear and bright but a cloud hangs over the occasion; Göring has ominous news to deliver. For the first time, the Wehrmacht has come to know abject defeat. 300,000 soldiers of the 6th army division are either dead or trapped, freezing and starving just outside Stalingrad. They’re not coming home. Further sacrifices will be necessary, and the German people must steel themselves to make those sacrifices.

Equally demoralizing is the sight of Berlin itself. There’s bomb damage. The city is by no means the rubble-heap it will eventually be reduced to, but one can easily see the debris caused by night-time bombing raids of the Royal Air Force which have become a normality.

This especially stings Göring, who once boasted that “If a single bomb falls on Berlin, you can call me ‘Meyer’”. Another variant of the boast offers ‘a Dutchman.’ Both of which are German insults, I suppose.

Oh well. At least the bombs have always fallen at night. In the dark, they don’t fall very accurately, and don’t interfere with day-time activities. Nobody dares challenge the formidable anti-aircraft guns by the light of day. At least that’s something.

The clock strikes 11 AM. It is Göring’s job to lift the people’s hope and rouse their courage. He ascends the podium. All citizens of the Reich tune into their radios, which are provided at low cost by the State. Listening isn’t just encouraged, it’s mandatory.

As Göring lifts his rotund form up the stairs to address his people, the Royal Air Force beats him to the microphone. Three RAF ‘Mosquitoes’ have spent the morning skimming the German countryside at low altitude, deftly avoiding anti-aircraft guns and detection. In a nearly unthinkable, daredevil mission - they fly in broad daylight, without escorts, at a time when Germany’s air-defenses were at maximum capability and readiness. Their target is Göring.

Explosions erupt nearby the hall. The radio audience hear the explosions and panicked cries to take cover. The broadcast switches abruptly to classical music.

Göring sits in the basement, fuming and humiliated. The RAF has delivered a terrifying message : “Your suffering will not only be thousands of miles to the East in Russia. We can hit you. We can hit you anywhere, at any time, night or day. We can fly straight to the heart of Berlin itself in the full light of day. Your future will be spent not in glory, but cowering in a bomb shelter.”

An hour went by as Göring sat there, waiting for the skies to clear and the panic subside.

Only then did Meyer The Dutchman take to the podium to offer a much gloomier speech.

Later that day, Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels gave another speech. Göring was a military man, it was Goebbels who was the great orator.

As he began his speech three more bombers returned and did it again!

I think it was this day that even the most optimistic German really understood that Hitler - far from being a savior - had opened the skies to a terrible destruction which had only just begun to fall.


Aug 19, 2019

What simple arguments can I give to my friends who sincerely believe that global warming is a hoax?

First, read Alistair Riddoch ‘s answer because it’s better than mine.

Next - and this used to be routinely taught in any college liberal arts core - winning a debate is much like war : Carefully study the terrain you seek to conquer.

Flip the chess-board. Build the strongest case against your view that you can. Not some half-hearted straw man, but really make an earnest effort to build a factual, compelling and passionate case for the other side.

One of three things will result :

You will find out where they are strongest and you are weakest, and shore up your arguments accordingly. Go get ‘em, soldier.

You will find yourself persuaded and switch sides. No need for gunfire, just stroll across the border.

You will realize that both sides are strong, and that war is a bad idea. You’re not entirely sure who’s right.

People who flip the chessboard are at a staggering advantage in a debate. They opt out of debates where any position is vulnerable (3), and they take up arms when they have already thought through how to defeat their opponent’s defenses. (1 2).


Aug 19, 2019

What should you never say to a Python developer?

“Nice scripting language.”


Aug 20, 2019

How do I run a PY file in Python shell?

if the file is named myfile.py, do this :

import myfile

Any python file in the current directory is treated as a module that you can import by leaving the .py extension off the name.

There is a subtlety with namespaces, anything defined within myfile, say xx, becomes myfile.xx .

If you don’t want to hassle with the ‘myfile.’ prefix to names, do this instead :

from myfile import *

This does the same thing, except it crashes the two namespaces together.


Aug 20, 2019

As a programmer, have you ever written some code that writes other code?

Yes and no.

To a Lisp programmer this is a none question.

The distinction between code and data is an artificial one. We tend, in our mind and most languages, to wall off the bits that do stuff from the bits that keep records.

But there is nothing essential about that distinction. That is clear from the outset in Lisp.

Everything is an S-expression, which is a generalized list (more clearly thought of as a tree).

A loop is an S-expression. So is a function. So is a number or a string. Everything is an S-expression.

Data and code can commingle and swirl around like there is no difference between them.

Because there isn’t. And never was.

This artificial distinction was a conceptual hack in order to define compiled languages, which speed things up by using a two-stage approach: During compilation all the executey stuff is pre-processed. At runtime, just data-y stuff is processed.

It was only ever an implementation detail and cheat to gain greater speed at the loss of generality.


Aug 21, 2019

Why can't the United States stop going to war?

There are lots of cynical answers about oil and imperialism and there’s a lot of ugly truth to be faced there.

But I want to bring up something else, which is simpler and really - easier to fix.

The US got dragged into WW II despite an overwhelming popular desire not to. But we did, and then several factors collided to create a perfect storm of history :

One of the reasons the US wanted to keep out of the war was that the American economy was kicking ass. We were resource rich, had a relatively large population of mostly literate, skilled workers. Our 19th century successes kicked off a feedback loop as America attracted innovators from abroad (Tesla, Carnegie, and many lesser lights). From cash to oil to steel, we were flush.

Then we entered WW II. We weren’t just the ‘arsenal of democracy’ - we were also its shelter. Flanked by two huge oceans, we emerged without a scratch while the rest of the world burned.

The brain drain into America reached insane proportions as Europe’s top scientists fled here as well (Einstein, Fermi, etc.)

By wars end the US had 1/2 the world’s gold, most of its industrial capacity, and the lion’s share of its scientific talent (we even snatched up Von Braun from the Nazis!)

Having fought double-wars in Europe and East Asia, we had bases and supply infrastructure that sat “bestride the world like a colossus”, as a British commentator once put it.

So it was a weird collision of geography, prosperity, and a progressive culture that created this global monster of an empire that - historians will note the irony - tried desperately to avoid being created.

But in 1946, there we were. Oh - and with the ultimate doomsday weapon.

There is something about being in that position that other nations don’t, I think, fully understand. It’s terrifying.

There is no greater power we can look to if another Hitler rises, or the Soviets go on an expansion spree. We’re the last stop.

So when, say, South Korea gets invaded, the nations all debate who is in the right. But it’s the US they look to for action.

If we don’t intervene, nobody else is likely to, and South Korea falls.

Yes, it’s not the US acting totally alone. Yes, it’s NATO or a ‘coalition of the willing.’ But if we are to be honest, it’s usually the US, Canada and the UK, with token support from other countries.

This creates a sort of reactive paranoia. When anything happens, anywhere, we have to make a snap decision what to do.

And more importantly, it puts the political leaders of the world in a position where their best move is often inactive duplicity. Iraq invades Kuwait, and America counter-invades. Some Arab nations can condemn America while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that someone is reigning in Iraq.

Even those who support us can do so with words or minimal forces, and be fairly certain of a favorable outcome.

So the US (and Canada and UK) are in hyper-reactive over-drive while other nations are parked in neutral. It’s really nobody’s fault, it’s just how we all ended up since 1950.

But it’s worth taking a hard look at. This whole ‘league of nations’ thing. Having a single country or a few countries running around the world tipping the course of human events is insane. Donald Trump’s presence in the white-house should be a global wake up call, if we needed one.

The world needs to act like … a world. Some sort of simple global constitution with an overwhelming military arsenal that enforces two simple rules :

Non aggression. Nobody attacks anybody else. An aggressor gets attacked and militarily occupied for a decade or whatever. If it’s not clear who started it, both belligerents get occupied.

No murder-sprees on your own population. Civil affairs are left untouched except for cases of genocide or other clear incidents of mass oppression.

That’s it. Give them most of the nukes and fly-over rights to every country on earth.

I know, I know - “World government! Globalist! What if it gets taken over by maniacs! What then!?”

Look at the idiot in the White House. Now Putin. We’re already taken over by maniacs.

It’s lunacy to reject a system that could fail in favor of one that already has.


Aug 22, 2019

Is the media repeating an obvious falsehood with recent announcements that Amazon Rain Forest produces 20% of the Earth's oxygen? If so, what’s going on here?

(I’m the asker so this is both partial answer and clarifying details.)

This misconception was settled way back in the late 70’s, if I recall. The Amazon Rain Forest is about a break-even for Oxygen; it consumes roughly what it produces via the jungle floor which is a huge mass of decaying plant matter and an O2 sink.

About 70 % comes from the largest source of plant life - the ocean. A mere 28% from all land plants globally.

So it seems the ‘20%’ figure for the rain forest is absurd on the face of it.

Am I wrong here? Or is nobody fact checking this in the news outlets?


Aug 22, 2019

What are the most epic university pranks in history?

Sorry to scoop you guys, but there is only one. The Harvey Mudd cannon was good work, don’t get me wrong. But the Crimson/Lampoon prank of 1953 tops them all. The perfect prank. A prank singularity. Mortals can only compete for 2nd place.

It’s 1953, and General Dwight Eisenhower was just elected President. The Russians just detonated their first atomic bomb, Senator McCarthy has been elected to a second term. The Cold War is so cold it could go white hot any minute. The American witch-hunt for “reds under the bed” - communists embedded into American society - is gathering strength.

Amidst all this national angst, fear and dread - a few kids at Harvard are determined to have fun anyway.

Two rival student newspapers, the Crimson and the Lampoon, are having an escalating prank-war.

The Crimson steals the ‘ibis’ - this dome-ish ornament with a bird on it - that sits atop Lampoon headquarters. One morning, it’s just been disassembled somehow and is gone.

The Lampoon is backed into a corner. How are they going to top this? How the hell did Crimson get up there? It’s right in view of the dorm room of the Lampoon’s president, John Updike. (Yes, that John Updike.) How’d nobody see them do it?

An idea strikes: The Lampoon will kidnap the Crimson’s president and whisk him away.

So they do that, and end up in Manhattan where police inform them that they can’t kidnap people just because it’s funny. They release the Crimson president and ask for their ibis back.

And what happens next is the stroke of genius that soars above the mortal world and takes its eternal place in the heavens, like the North Star, to forever shine, inspire, and guide us :

The Crimson explains they no longer have the ibis. They no longer have it …

.

.

but they know where it is …

.

.

.

because …

.

.

.

They donated it to the Soviet Union.

*mic drop

History of Pranks at Harvard

Cross-posted from Christopher Reiss's answer to What is the funniest prank?


Aug 23, 2019

How do I take a screenshot on Ubuntu?

Just whack that ‘PtrScr’ button on your keyboard. It’s there somewhere.


Aug 23, 2019

How much of the world’s oxygen does the Amazon rainforest produce?

About 0%.

There is a massive failure on the part of the news media to fact-check this. The figure of 20% has been broadly propagated as part of the coverage of the huge fires currently raging in the Amazon Rain Forest (Aug, 2019.) But nobody cites a scientific source.

Today (Aug 23, 2019) the BBC News took notice of this and published the following :

Our colleagues from BBC Reality Check spent most of the day on Friday getting to the bottom of this.
In the long run, the Amazon absorbs about the same amount of oxygen as it produces, effectively making the total produced net zero.
Professor Jon Lloyd from Imperial College London says although the Amazon produces a lot of oxygen during the day through photosynthesis, it absorbs about half of it back through the process of respiration to grow. Further oxygen is used up by the forest's soil, animals and microbes — BBC News, Amazon fires: Ten of your questions answered

Such lazy and reckless journalism (and activism) gives ammunition to the far right who obstruct taking action on the environment.

Lies are also flammable. The smoke they give off is the haze of doubt which dims the truth.

We need the truth most as the world burns.


Aug 23, 2019

What if the sun was a giant burning eye?

This begs the more urgent question : Where do you get your weed? Asking for a friend.


Aug 24, 2019

If the entire Amazon Rainforest was completely burnt, leaving us with less oxygen, how exactly would “less oxygen” affect the world?

The Amazon doesn’t actually contribute oxygen to the atmosphere -

Christopher Reiss's answer to How much of the world’s oxygen does the Amazon rainforest produce?


Aug 25, 2019

Why does the Amiga computer of the 1990's continue to exceed all expectations in almost every area of web & app performance, even today?

Because some of them are still running! It’s been over 25 years.


Aug 26, 2019

What software is good to use for parallel debugging?

If you’re using an NVidia GPU for massively parallel processing (and you probably should), nothing tops their Nsight IDE (available for both Eclipse and Visual Studio) :

Nsight Eclipse Edition


Aug 26, 2019

In the movie Ghost World, what does the title mean?

Warning : Spoilers ahead.

It’s all about the bus.

Since I first saw this movie 10 years ago (and read the graphic novel), I’ve wondered on and off about the title ‘Ghost World’.

It is a staggeringly good film that rewards repeated viewing, and i did just that last night and it dawned on me what the title almost certainly means.

In the final scene of the film, we see Enid wait for the mysterious bus, suitcase in hand, to leave her hometown behind her.

The bus shouldn’t be there at all; the bench at the bus stop clearly says Not In Service. However, Enid has been watching a man who waits for the bus every day anyway. Enid tries to tell him he’s wasting his time, he only responds “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s right.

At the end of the film, she watches in amazement as indeed - a bus appears, all seats empty, to whisk the man away.

She begins to understand this is no ordinary bus. This is some magical phantom that will come for you, but you don’t know when. That old man waited endlessly for it.

Meanwhile, up to this point in the film, everything in Enid’s life has fallen away. Her friendships, her job(s), her home life, her aspirations for the local art school have all come to nothing. The town she lives in is banal and vacuous. It is a huge strip mall; a scrap-heap of middle class consumerism. No one likes her and no one is like her.

She packs a suitcase and heads for the bus-stop. She’s knows the bus is coming for her because she’s figured it out :

The mystery-bus comes for those who are fully ready to leave.

She is and it does.

And the title? I think Daniel Clowes originally thought to call it Ghost Bus. In the same vein as a ghost ship or a ghost train : These are mythical ships that sank or trains that were destroyed, but which defy death to reappear in the mortal world.

But - not only does the title ‘Ghost Bus’ sound awful; it’s the opposite of what Clowes wants to say. While the bus may indeed be mysterious, it is very much alive, come to rescue Enid. It’s Enid’s world that’s gone dead.

A Ghost World.


Sep 5, 2019

What are the best programming comic strips?

A fresh burst of realism that also manages a swipe at blockchain :


Sep 9, 2019

How does Dave Chappelle get away with his outrageously politically incorrect - and brilliantly funny - material about the LGBTQ and MeToo communities on his new Netflix special?

20-something’s, there is something we Gen-X’ers haven’t been telling you. It’s not been very mature of us, admittedly. But the joke has gone on too long now, it’s time to come clean :

Political trends are temporary. Everything - from the hippy peace movement to feminism to conservative materialism - takes about 5 years to ramp up. Then it peaks. Then it ramps down for another 5 years.

Then it swings the other way. We get out of Vietnam, and 10 years later decide to re-arm like crazy to drive the Soviets into bankruptcy. Those flower children at Woodstock became investment bankers in their mid-30’s.

Let’s check the calendar. The ‘woke’, intersectional, third-wave, 60 gender pronoun thing got started around Obama’s second term, 2012 or so. It peaked a couple of years ago, when Trump got elected. It reached maximum shrill after the election, but a lot of folks quietly, secretly noted that their wokeness just lost an election to the weakest candidate in American history. Whoops.

That would place the peak around 2017, and we are now halfway down the decline. A growing chorus of voices is directly challenging it. A chorus from the Left.

Comedy is an excellent detector of insanity. A funny joke is one that reveals the absurd. Not in an intellectual way, but in a visceral way. A good joke targets the things that we deeply understand to be absurd, without regard to ideological fashion.

In a political conflict, a reliable indicator of who is right is quite simply : The one who’s laughing. The non laughers are just angry.

So as wokeness approaches its end-of-life, cue the comedians : Dave Chapelle. Ricky Gervais. Jerry Seinfeld. Chris Rock. I only stopped because I’ve got stuff to do, the flood is endless. Just google ‘comedian woke’ and you can stretch the list into the hundreds and thousands.

‘Don’t Apologize’: Ricky Gervais Takes On Verbal Terrorism | National Review

So, woke millenials, here comes the pendulum swinging back, right on schedule. Might want to scrub your Twitter posts before somebody archives it and blackmails you later (you think bell-bottoms don’t age well, wait till people quote you in 5 years.)

Yea, we Gen-X’ers should have told you sooner. If it’s any consolation, the boomers did the same thing to us …


Sep 17, 2019

Is vaping killing people, or are people putting things in them that are causing deaths?

All evidence so far points to a single culprit : adulterated, black market THC vapes that contained Vitamin E oil, something which should never be inhaled.

The CDC et al. haven’t come down solidly on this conclusion; but of the 500 or so cases in the US, over 80% self-reported using black market THC vapes. Given that such vapes are ordinarily a very small percentage of all vapers, seeing 80% suggests a real figure of 100%, where 20 % don’t want to admit breaking the law. (Their average age is 19.)

The health benefits of vaping over smoking still holds, as the UK’s NIH reports. (Interestingly, the UK has a totally different attitude toward vaping. Also interestingly, the NIH picks up the bill for smoking related illnesses.)

Aside from some bogus weed vapes, the story has been blown all out of proportion quite intentionally. The anti-vape crowd has 2 concerns : 1) That vaping is just a way to keep smokers addicted and is just as harmful. That concern is readily demonstrable horse-shit. The second concern is that teens are getting newly addicted to nicotine. That one’s probably true and seems valid to me.

So the Vitamin E scare is being held in limbo for a while so it remains a general scare. “Not really sure what the cause, suggest avoid all vaping …” So the scare can be re-purposed against teen vaping.

The whole thing is all kinds of stupid. Lying to teenagers will backfire because they will google down your lies and never listen to you again.

And keeping vapes out of the hands of teens is an entirely different problem than a Vitamin E scare. This gets solved at point-of-purchase locations and online, probably with the cooperation of local schools and parents.

This fear-mongering is literally likely to kill people. These scares can drive legitimate e-cig makers bankrupt. So in comes the black market to fill the void not just for THC but now nicotine too.

And the next time a poison slips into the process we’ve got 5,000 dead instead of 5.

Hysteria and bullshit don’t save lives. They may seem expedient at the time, but they destroy the medical profession’s credibility with their target audience, and erode the nascent legitimate supply chain which - as the NIH pointedly remarks - is the one and only actual fucking way to keep from poisoning people.


Sep 18, 2019

During a Python developer interview, what are some red flags that you cannot ignore?

They have a quick answer for “Are parameters passed to functions by reference or value?”

“Value” is wrong. So is “Reference”.

The right answer is a quick smile, a pause, and something like “That’s a little tricky, actually.”

The technical term is pass-by-assignment. This was an unusual design choice, Python kind of broke the mold here. There are subtleties, exceptions, etc.

They don’t need to deliver a white-paper on pass-by-assignment. You should just know about it, be able to talk about at a high level and be familiar with various ways to use it.

(Added. In the comments, Patrick Senti starts a argument with me [which he wins!], that responds to the question in what I think is the best possible way. https://www.quora.com/During-a-Python-developer-interview-what-are-some-red-flags-that-you-cannot-ignore/answer/Christopher-Reiss/comment/123299403)


Sep 18, 2019

What is pass-by-assignment in Python?

(Cross-post from Christopher Reiss's answer to How do you pass by value and pass by reference in Python?)

Technically, Python uses “pass by assignment.” This is like call-by-value, in that you can do this :

>def plus_1(x) :

> x=x+1

>

>x=5

>plus_1(x)

>print x

5

Here, x was passed by value - local changes within the function didn’t echo back to the calling scope.

However, if we use a list, elements are passed by reference. So that here,

>def plus_1(x) :

> x[0]=x[0]+1

>

>x=[5]

>plus_1(x)

>print x[0]

6

So we can think of it as a “shallow copy”. A change to any list element will be reflected back, but if we change the “top level” - blast away the list itself, that change won’t be seen outside the function. So while x[0]=99 gets passed back, x = [55,66] won’t.

This works for any mutable data type like a dictionary or an object you defined in a class.

More on this topic here - Programming FAQ - Python 3.7.1rc2 documentation

Note : Functional programming monks will state you should never change variables that were passed in, rather, you should compose a completely new list/dict and return that.


Sep 19, 2019

Where is the best place to go for a commission job for something I want written in Python?

In my experience Upwork has the best talent pool. I like to think I play a small part in holding up that standard :

Chris Reiss on Upwork.


Sep 25, 2019

What screams "I'm not American" in the United States?

Indicating the number 3 like this is a give-away you’re not American :

We do it like this :

Not tipping (20%) for a restaurant server, bartender, food delivery person, taxi, barber, and other examples. Americans consider it offensive not to tip all these people.

Calling your boss ‘Sir’ and ‘Mr/Ms’. Americans only use “Sir/Ma’am” for a stranger or a customer. Everyone else is a first-name basis.

Overdressing for work. Except for customer-facing jobs, Americans tend to dress the same at work as they do at home.

Writing in long sentences with flowery language. Americans write short sentences.

When eating with a knife, Americans switch the fork from right-hand to left and back again. It’s a little strange when you think about it, but if you watch us: We put the fork in our left hand, take the knife in our right, stab the meat with the fork, cut with the knife, put the knife down and return the fork to our right hand.


Oct 16, 2019

Why aren’t more white males intersectional feminists?

Because intersectional feminism is anti-feminist. It reverses some of the gains of the feminist movement. It harms women.

Second-wave, “equity feminism” asserts a self-evident truth : That society must be gender-blind in law, economics, and culture. Yes, of course we see gender. We just don’t consider it when we hire, when we vote, etc.

Intersectional feminism reverses this and asserts the primacy of gender in all matters. That we must always consider women as an oppressed class, and men as the ‘patriarchy’. That we therefore must always preference women to compensate for the inequities of the past and present.

And further than this : We must apply the same reasoning to race, disability, and any other factor which might tend to disadvantage a person in the past or present.

This undoes the work of generations of true feminists who struggled to get society to look past gender to see the individual. The negative effects of this are numerous and easy to rattle off, I’ll just go with one:

Last election I supported Hillary Clinton. This election I support Elizabeth Warren. And way back I supported Obama.

At no point did I give a moment’s consideration to the gender or race of the candidate. I never looked at the field of candidates on the debate stage and counted the women or people of color.

My choice was gender- and race-blind. I simply thought Obama and Clinton were the better candidates.

An intersectional feminist would immediately point out that I am a white male, blinded by privilege, advancing the patriarchy, and fraught with male fragility.

That I shouldn’t speak at all on this matter. That I should refrain from ‘centering’ myself in the discussion.

But I will speak. And I won’t budge an inch from the principle that character and ability is all that matters. Gender and race don’t come first, or even second. They have no place at all in our consideration.

This was the ground gained by second wave feminists, and by anti-racists like Martin Luther King. This ground led millions of white voters - from the secrecy of the voting booth - to elect our first black president based solely on his merit.

This is the ground from which I absolutely refuse to move.


Oct 21, 2019

How do Democrats defend the fact that Obama attacked Iraq in 2003?

Hmm. That’s a tough one.

Maybe … Obama was neither President nor even Senator in 2003?

There’s that.


Oct 21, 2019

If you are in the woods with small children and you happen upon a bear, what course of action should you take?

Just remain chill, walk away at a normal pace. Scan around for any bear cubs (unlikely) and make sure you’re not approaching one. If you’re not approaching them, their cubs, or running away - bears don’t find people appetizing or interesting. We’re more of a disruptive annoyance.

The native americans taught the colonists a good trick for hiking in bear country : carry a big stick and whack it against trees and bushes as you go. The sound signals your presence to bears who prefer to avoid you, especially if they have cubs, so that you avert these close encounters altogether.

Legend has it this practice is a show of ‘respect’ for the bears and their territory, and the bear responds in kind by not mauling you to pieces.

Pausing for bear selfies is right out.


Oct 21, 2019

Why are there no conspiracy theories about Soviets planting the idea that the United States never went to the moon?

Mentioning the Soviets is a bad idea for any moon conspiracist of any stripe.

Because it opens up a chain of reasoning that nukes any and all conspiracy theories about the moon landing.

The Soviets were tailing just behind Apollo 11 with a probe.

The Luna 15 probe was orbiting the moon as Apollo 11 approached. The Soviets made no secret of it. In fact, they coordinated with NASA so communications didn’t get tangled up between the two vehicles.

The Soviets had previously taken pictures of the dark side of the moon with another probe, so Luna 15 was able to both watch and listen at very close range to Apollo 11.

If the US tried to fake it, the Soviets would have busted us on the lie.

By warning us ahead of time, the Soviets removed any possibility that we would even consider faking it.

So we landed on the moon. QED.

Any conspiracy theory that we didn’t land is absurd on the face of it.

A meta-conspiracy that the Soviets planted the idea isn’t beyond the realm of the possible, it’s just rather silly and futile given that any moon-hoaxer’s most rational next move is to turn around and ask the Soviets, “So - what did Luna 15 see ?”


Oct 22, 2019

What was the Soviet’s response to the Moon landing?

Despite the seething hatred between the US and USSR, a shred of good sportsmanship took hold when it came to the space race.

When the Soviets launched the first satellite into space, and then the first man, a message of congratulations was sent from the US.

The Soviets returned the courtesy when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. Soviet Chairman Nikolay Podgorny sent a cable to President Nixon offering "our congratulations and best wishes to the space pilots."

Neither side was sincere, of course, but it’s still commendable that each side upheld the appearance of being gracious in defeat.


Oct 25, 2019

I am not Jewish, but my boyfriend is. His family recently cut him off even though he still has 2 months left of college, and I suspect that it is because he is with me. What should I do?

That’s a real tough one. Sorry for both of you.

One option is to suggest your boyfriend have a long talk with his parent’s rabbi. He is almost certain to disagree with the parent’s decision, and may be the one person that can change their mind.

Even the more conservative rabbis have come around to acceptance of ‘mixed’ marriages : Conservative rabbis given blessing to attend mixed marriages


Oct 25, 2019

If South Korea and North Korea having a war, is it effecting the world?

The first global effect would be an economic melt-down. South Korea’s economy is the fourth largest in East Asia, and the 11′th largest in the world.

The US would immediately start shooting and heavy bombing, targeting NK’s large artillery battery along the DMZ, NK’s command-and control, communications, electric power, nuclear and missile sites, and Kim Jung Un personally.

I expect China would intercede to stop the war, possibly going so far as to occupy North Korea militarily.


Oct 30, 2019

Why does the open source community let cloud vendors get away with the misuse of source code and make money?

The Open Source movement is no enemy to capitalism. It encourages people to go and build profitable enterprises based on its work.

The philosophy is not about profit, but rather secrecy. Open Source just wants developers - everywhere - to have the option to improve software, and to review it for possible security holes.

If you’re running closed-source software, who’s to say that some government agency hasn’t planted a back-door to illegally access your data? (There is some evidence that Microsoft and the NSA did just that back in 2000 - _NSAKEY - Wikipedia)

Open Source offers “open covenants, openly arrived at.” No being tricksy.

If you can make a fortune with it, more power to ya.

In fact, those profitable enterprises using OSS very often turn around and return the favor by donating staggering amounts of man-power and code back into Open Source Developer. Google’s been the most generous, but others like Facebook have also “paid it forward”. And, in a twist of fate that would seem unthinkable 20 years ago, Microsoft - once the mortal enemy of Open Source - has done a complete reversal and is contributing code like crazy to OSS.

The OSS model has really proven its superiority both technically and economically.


Oct 30, 2019

What is the best example of a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output?

Oh, this is an old puzzle posed to programmers for generations. I won’t give away the answer because in the course of solving it you will find yourself - yes you! - recreating the heart of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the Church-Turing thesis. The act of solving it is an unexpectedly rich intellectual treasure trove.

I’ll give you a hint: You are going to need the fact that alphanumeric characters can be converted to an integer (their ASCII value.)

Aside from that, there’s nothing magic going on. It’s just strings and print statements and some clever substitutions.

Have at it and return to it if you fail. It’s worth it.

When you succeed, go look up how Godel constructed his ‘G’ and something called ‘quines’. You will find yourself in the company of immortals.


Oct 31, 2019

How would you use machine learning to improve airports?

Hmm. In my experience, the big bottle-neck at airports is going through security.

Some passengers know how to make things easy for TSA. People who fly a lot, like I did weekly when I worked as a consultant. Boston to Denver and back.

We plane-iacs know how not to trigger a ‘baggage check’. All fluid containers out and below the max allowed size. Laptop in separate bin. ID and ticket out. Shoes and belt come off in a few seconds. All that stuff - you get good at it.

Rather than have people stand in a common line and wait for the (random) next available security gate, you could use machine learning to sort them by speed and assign them accordingly to a specific TSA gate.

Like a passing lane on a highway. This would increase throughput (thus decreasing average wait time) in a couple of ways.

First - the fast-movers wouldn’t be blocked waiting for the slow movers, and would go sailing through quickly.

Second, TSA agents doing the bag- and body-checks could be reallocated to the slow lanes to double the number of checkers, speeding up the slow pokes as well.

Finally, as people became aware of this system, there would be a huge incentive to become one of the fast-movers. To thoroughly learn the TSA regulations and comply 100%.


Oct 31, 2019

How do I make a quick simple program that can be accessed and I can run it by clicking on a URL?

For this, I’ve found nothing beats the Python module Flask : Steps for Starting a New Flask Project using Python3

You’ll need a local web server first, on your development machine. I suggest Apache as it’s easy-ish to install on any OS.

Once you can hit your local URL - http://127.0.0.1/ , Flask can be used to build a web accessible ‘hello world’ in just a few lines :

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')

def index():

return "Hello World!"

When you’re happy with it, you can push it to a remote server like an Amazon EC2 instance (10 bucks/month or something.)

Pro-tip : When you set up your server, choose the same OS as your laptop so that setup is nearly identical to both. Using Ubuntu for both is, I’ve found, a big time-saver.


Nov 2, 2019

What is your opinion of the controversial Gillette ad against toxic masculinity?

Other writers have done a great job answering this question in a big way. The social context, the implications, the financial calculus of it all.

So let me answer in a very small way.

I have used Gillette shaving cream my whole life. Why, you ask?

No fucking reason whatsoever.

It was familiar, it was cheap, I never gave it a second’s thought.

Then I saw their ad. I found it insulting. I won’t belabor you with why, I just did.

They have a God-given right to insult me, to be clear. But not with my money.

It’s been 11 months since that ad aired, and just today I used up the last of my Gillette shaving cream. It took so long because recently I discovered something. The shave gel my fiancee uses on her legs works just as well, and perhaps better since it foams up less. I can see the skin beneath.

So that’s what I use now. If anyone asks why I’m using her shave gel, my answer is :

No fucking reason whatsoever. It’s familiar. It’s cheap. I don’t give it a second’s thought - so long as it’s not Gillette.

I’m not going to change my mind because I’ll never think about it again. I don’t even fucking remember shaving in the morning.

For all I know aliens abduct me in my sleep and redeposit me clean-shaven.

And that’s it. A 40 year customer, gone forever.

Gillette’s advertising is just another thing I’ll never have to think about.


Nov 3, 2019

How can Democrats impeach President Donald Trump if they lack a two-third majority in the Senate? Do they expect the support of some Republicans?

Democrats remember Nixon.

So do Republicans.

Here’s how it went down : The House began an impeachment inquiry on live television. Public support to impeach and remove the President was around 35%.

Republicans closed ranks around the President, publicly defending him and condemning the impeachment hearings. Privately, they admitted there’s a real problem here - but they need to mitigate the damage to the Republican Party. And they didn’t want to lose votes back home in their home state.

As the hearings moved forward, and the evidence came to light, voter support tipped over 50%. Basically all Democrats and half of the swing voters.

More and more damning evidence emerged, and public support to impeach and remove hit 60%. That’s now all the Democrats, all the swing voters, and a slice of Republicans as well.

That’s the point where supporting the President became a liability for Republican Senators. If they vote against removing Nixon, they risk losing the next election to a Democrat (who gets all the swing votes).

Then again, if they vote to remove, they’d anger a good portion of their base, and could lose to a Republican challenger who calls them a toadie of the Democrats.

So they are in a no-win situation. The only winning move is not to play:

The Republican Senate leadership had a talk with Nixon. A private talk, none of which is on the record, but we can make an educated guess as to what it sounded like.

“Mr. President, the Senate has enough votes to remove you from office. You’ve seen the poll numbers, you know that politically they’ll take more damage from supporting you than from kicking you out.

We’d rather not take any damage at all. If you resign, we don’t have to vote at all. Senators don’t lose votes back home. That would make us very happy.

We’d be in such a good mood, in fact, that we would pull some strings and make sure no criminal prosecution comes after you. Hell - maybe even a pardon - which would immunize you forever from prosecution - would be granted by your successor.

You’re out, Dick. You want to go easy, or you want to go hard?”

Nixon resigned just before the House sent articles of impeachment to the Senate.


Nov 3, 2019

What kind of application/website would you recommend to stay up to date with some essential computer science and tech news?

I spent a few hours recently to find an app that fed me news on my favorite topics. Like Pandora/Spotify, it pays attention to your Likes/Dislikes and tunes accordingly.

I landed on News360: Your Personalized News Reader as the clear winner. Both web and app.

Just ‘seed’ it with your favorite topics and you’re off.


Nov 7, 2019

What would you do if your neighbour hung a Nazi flag outside their house?

I’d put up a sign on my lawn,

“Jesus said : ‘Love thy neighbor’, but still hasn’t bought my house.”


Nov 10, 2019

What are some notable uses for backpropagation algorithms?

Every Neural Net ever.


Nov 14, 2019

I need to insert a complicated math equation into a cartoon and I'd like it to actually be real rather than just a jumble of symbols. What is an example of a long, complex-looking math equation?

I give you Einstein’s Field Equation, his greatest achievement. Not only does it look cool, but physics-savvy people will get a kick out of recognizing it in the cartoon …


Nov 16, 2019

Do you dream immediately upon falling asleep?

Yes, I do too. It seems we’re a rare (and perhaps unstudied) breed.

And of my thousands of interactions with Quora, this one is definitely the coolest.

I was just watching a video about sleep patterns. Then came the part where they asserted that healthy humans take 60–90 minutes to enter REM sleep, where they begin to dream.

I hit pause and thought, “whah!?”

I dream almost instantly. I know this because I frequently wake up from a dream just 5 or 10 minutes after closing my eyes. (Apparently we all wake up briefly at a dream’s end.)

I was aware of the whole REM cycle thing, but didn’t realize how rigid it is and how rare exceptions are.

I did some reading and it is most commonly associated with Narcolepsy and with people who are very sleep-deprived.

But I have neither of these conditions - I sleep just fine. I just dream almost instantly and always have.

I also found mention on the web of a phenomena called Hypnagogia - Wikipedia , which is a sort of twilight between wakefulness and sleep, where the person can experience some sensory hallucinations - but not the cohesive narrative structure of a full-on dream.

Nope, that’s not me either. I can close my eyes and in a few minutes be flying a helicopter over the jungles of Peru with Elton John and Enrico Fermi.

I wonder how many of us there are? Since there’s nothing really wrong with it - no pathology like Narcolepsy to get doctors worked up about - could this be an essentially unstudied minority of the human population?

Anyway. Incredulous researchers are welcome to watch my eyelids while I nap.


Nov 19, 2019

How does if(1, 2): print('foo') work in Python?

The ‘truth’ value of any tuple () or list [] is a test for non-emptiness.

So

if (1,2): print('hi')

succeeds and says “hi” . But

if () : print('hi')

keeps quiet.

It’s the same as the expression

a=(1,2)

if len(a)>0 : print('hi')

This last case is better form, IMO, as it makes clear how this works.


Nov 22, 2019

I was trying to print a list of 57,000 names at work in Python and the computer locked up for like 20 minutes. What languages can do this with very little waiting?

There's an error in your code. Sounds like you are either flooding RAM, doing insane loops to nowhere, or are pulling the names in wrong from a database.

60,000 strings should take much less than 30 seconds in any language on any system.

Switching languages at this point is like abandoning your car just because you got lost. You will spend a great deal only to discover you still don’t know the way.

Step through the code.


Nov 22, 2019

How do you tell if a set of points is a function?

If there are no two points with the same x but different y .

This way f(x) maps to a single y without ambiguity. That’s the defining feature of a function.

And nothing else. (I usually don’t answer homework problems, but the question is a good one due to the simplicity of the answer.)


Dec 15, 2019

What are some good songs?

You haven’t heard this.

But I Just. Can’t. Stop. Playing it.

My friends tell me the same.

It’s by an indie female vocalist in NYC - Jackie Kamel. The track is called Texas :

Released about 6 weeks ago, yet to be signed by any big label, I’m guessing only a few thousand people have heard it to date (Dec 15, 2019).

Cool video, too.


Dec 17, 2019

How do you evaluate one list minus another in Python?

I take it you mean the arithmetic ‘minus’ of the two lists (component-wise subtraction.)

When you find yourself asking this question, this is a sign-post which indicates it’s time to start regularly using the numpy module.

Numpy is so commonly used it’s really a defacto standard part of the language. Numpy provides (among an insane library of math functionality), a pythonic elegance to basic arithmetic.

Because - to subtract a list B from list A, don’t you want to write C = A - B ?

Of course you do. So, import numpy and do conversions like this :

import numpy as np

a=[6,3,6,8,9,6,4]

b=[1,0,1,2,1,2,1]

a = np.array(a) #Convert list to np array

b = np.array(b)

c = a - b

And that’s it. It works for other operations like * and so forth. And no need to freak out that now your lists are in some strange np.array container, these arrays allow for identical indexing using [] and slicing using [:] as lists do.

And you can always get a list back by saying c.list() .

Experienced python programmers, when doing a good amount arithmetic, tend to use numpy arrays rather than lists to hold numbers.

Congrats on levelling up !


Dec 21, 2019

Has Representative Tulsi Gabbard hurt her chances for reelection in 2020 by not voting for the impeachment of President Trump?

Yes - abstaining from the Impeachment vote was political suicide, pure and simple. Her group of supporters - small but insistent and active - will abandon her in droves. Myself included.

She won’t make another Democratic debate. There won’t be enough donors to qualify her.

Nor will any candidate consider her for VP, nor will she be appointed to a prominent office like Secretary of State.

She stated she did not intend to run for another term as Representative for Hawaii; that’s just as well as she’ll never be elected to one anyway.

Her fatal - and staggering really - error was to use her vote to signal some sort of protest against the partisan impeachment proceedings.

And she is absolutely right that the process has been a partisan train-wreck, and the votes have been a mere Party head-count.

But that’s the process. The issue under consideration is a constitutional crisis which will decide for generations to come the limits of Executive Power.

This is one of those rare times where it’s better to be wrong than refuse action.

In the course of time, we forgive the Japanese pilot who sunk the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. We come to see him as a good man fighting for the wrong side.

But the American soldier who deserts his anti-aircraft guns at the first sign of attack - we hold him in cold and permanent contempt.

Because this is a man with no values worth fighting for.

The pilot is redeemable. The deserter is not.


Dec 24, 2019

Why is Gen X generally left out of the current battle of the generations?

As Dan Holliday ‘s epic rant so powerfully expresses, Gen X is this close to literally, physically beating the crap out of woke millenials.

We are not as polite as the Boomers. We’re rude, cynical and raucous. ‘Woke’ millennials avoid us because their tactics are an attempt to take advantage of the idealism, good manners, and good will of others.

Their agenda is control for control’s sake. They want to control the words you use, and dictate terms on who can speak them.

So they claim that “words are violence.” That a mere utterance is injurious, hence unjust.

Boomers are idealists - they were the flower children. Their default response to a claim of injustice is to yield (at least initially). Because injustice was everywhere in the 1960’s.

Gen-X’ers aren’t like that at all. We don’t have that same idealism, we don’t assume good will, and we aren’t polite.

So we don’t give that first inch. Here’s a bit of call-and-response to illustrate.

“Words can be violence.”

“Fine. I’ll punch you in the fucking face next time you say that.”

“Check your privilege!”

“Check your facts you goddamn retard. You’re quoting Das Kapital and don’t realize it with that privilege crap. Oh - and how about checking a ballot box next time? Voter turn-out under 30 dropped in the Trump election.”

“You can’t say retard! It denigrates people with disabilities!”

Fuck you, jack-ass. What denigrates people with disabilities are people who seek to steal their accomodations by laying false claim to disability. ‘Triggered’ much? Too fat to fit in the goddamn door? Need a reserved parking space or a 14th bathroom?”

“You’re a straight white male! You can’t understand -

A single Gen-X dyke could kick 50 of your asses without getting off her motorcycle.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s funny as hell. But it’s the sort of collision that advances nobody’s agenda. And it gets pretty ugly. So the two natural enemies keep their distance.

Which leaves, “OK Boomer.”


Jan 1, 2020

Is gradually reducing the number of cigarettes smoked per day an effective way to quit?

Sure, I think ‘tapering’ is a good strategy for any type of addiction. It allows you to loosen both the psychological and physiological bonds in a gradual, less difficult way.

Just make sure you have a hard quit date where you go to zero and stay there. Any recovered addict will tell you if you continue using even a small amount daily, the addiction tends to flare up again and you’re back to square 1.


Jan 9, 2020

Are the Iran/United States tensions over?

Yea - my sense is that Iran didn’t take the bait.

That this is all about Iran’s uranium enrichment program. I think the US has some intelligence (credible, for once) that Iran was cheating on their previous commitment to limit enrichment. So the US pulled out of the deal, and by killing their military leader hoped to provoke Iranian retaliation.

Then the US could do what it most wants to do, which is bomb Iran to knock out their nuclear program, missile launch sites, air defenses and related infrastructure.

Iran anticipated this, and made a great show of launching medium-range missiles at American bases - toward a target they knew would have advance warning of the attack and which was disbursed in hardened bunkers to avoid casualties.

It was all theatre directed at the Iranian television audience. Some analysts observed the strikes appear carefully calculated to avoid inflicting any actual damage.

It’s still a win for the US, having degraded Iran’s military capability and forcing Iran to make a clear choice to either negotiate in good faith or fight it out.

In either case their nuclear program is brought under control.

I was finally convinced of all this by Trump’s press conference after the Iranian strikes, where early on - reading very cautiously from a teleprompter - Trump states “Iran must never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.” Which seems a complete non sequitur unless we place it in the above context.


Jan 12, 2020

Why didn't President Putin condemn the killing of Iran's Souleimani with a strong term? Was he not showing Iran that he is with them even if the war starts between Iran and the US?

I have a very strong feeling that a few months back Putin said to Trump, “I want to do some naughty things with Turkey and Syria. If you stay out of my way, I’ll avert my gaze while you get naughty with Iran.”

“Deal!”


Jan 16, 2020

Do anyone know when the problem started with the United States and Iran?

In 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected in - to all appearances - free and fair elections in Iran. This signaled the rise of Democracy over Monarchy in Iran.

However, Mosaddegh was already on the West’s shit-list for nationalizing the nation’s oil producing facilities, nullifying foreign ownership (mostly British) of its oil reserves. To be fair, Mosaddegh did provide for a huge percentage of oil profits be set aside to compensate these companies for their investment.

The US was in the grips of cold-war fear of commies. Nationalizing massive industries was seen as a signature move toward communism.

So the CIA - by their own admission - enacted a coup d’etat to bring down the government. (This was called Operation Ajax.)

The long-term consequences of this were horrible. The Shah was a brutal, oppressive kleptocracy. The government that overthrew him is a fanatic theocracy which is the primary incubator of international terrorism against the west. One that hates America for very good reason.

In March, 2000, Madeleine Allbright apologized to Iran for the coup.


Jan 17, 2020

As I learn more machine learning and deep learning, I find neural network and other ML algorithms are not actually very difficult, why do some machine learning developers act like a god in front of other developers and think they are superior?

Some other good answers here, especially about the inherent ego of all technical people.

I’ll speak of not the people, but the subject itself - to defuse a bit the role of personality. ML development can make a legitimate claim to being more difficult but more important.

Firstly, very few areas of software development are driven by mathematical papers just 6 months old. Most other developers have never read a research paper and don’t remember enough math to read one. While other fields advance at a comparatively calm pace, machine learning is racing ahead through a blizzard of abstractions.

So ML developers need to apply more skills and must work almost daily on refreshing their knowledge of the state of the art.

Secondly, Now Is The Time. Similar to the way Carnegie’s mass-produced steel gave rise to New York’s sky-scrapers, advances in CPU/GPU’s have reached a tipping point where $200 buys enough processing power to train neural networks.

Finally, Machine Learning isn’t really about machines. Quite the opposite - it’s about humans.

How can we glance at a room and discern 100 objects without effort? And recognize a face?

How does a child learn to speak a language just by hearing it?

How do we think? We know that neuron cells arrange themselves - with no apparent divine intervention - to produce the baffling miracle of sentience.

And it’s not just humans - a bird adapts to a gust of wind with a graceful and effortless turn of its wing. (A skill the Wright brothers had to learn from watching birds.) Bees and ants work as a collective, sharing knowledge and dividing labor.

So Machine Learning isn’t just about humans, either.

It’s about Nature. How life gives rise to intelligence in forms ranging from Beethoven’s 9th to the flight of hummingbirds.

Is it all hype that will peter out soon? I don’t know. Are most people applying this technology doing important research? Of course not.

Will it succeed? No telling.

But one startling fact emerges : The deepest, most important, and most impactful mystery to bewilder humanity through the ages is this : The origin of Mind.

For the first time millions of people have the means to explore the mystery. They’re making progress.

I don’t know how far we’ll get. But I can’t imagine a more urgent direction to explore.


Jan 18, 2020

Why is there no activation function like x^2 or x^3 if activation functions are just used to introduce nonlinearity?

History.

I find it useful to always bear in mind that Neural Nets began with image recognition (see the Perceptron back in 1958.)

A lot of intuition has been developed since then, but most of it hailing from the world of images.

If you’re not playing with a huge signal which is mostly noise (images or sound) - but instead are tinkering somewhere else (like NLP) - you should be wary of old habits.

Now, the usual activation functions do share some important features. They keep the weights and gradients from blowing up or vanishing. For example, sigmoid and tanh bound the weights and gradients to between -1 and 1. Others activations do little more but stamp out negative values (RELU, SELU), but are still guaranteed not to make things any worse.

But there are more direct and more complete ways to address the exploding/vanishing problem.

These techniques are so much more powerful than relying on the activation functions that one will usually see them in SOTA solutions in addition to conventional activation functions.

Don’t want exploding gradients? Fine - clip the gradient explicitly, How to Avoid Exploding Gradients With Gradient Clipping .

Don’t want exploding weights either? Add Layer Normalization - a ‘layer’ whose sole purpose is to reign in the weights to some reasonable scale. Or Batch Normalization. A Gentle Introduction to Batch Normalization for Deep Neural Networks

When you do these things - a Miracle Occurs. Not only is the exploding gradient problem gone - but your model converges more rapidly and is less sensitive to things like Learning Rate and initial weights.

So you should be doing this any way.

Which suddenly frees you to try any activation function you like. Like x^2.

About that. I came upon this question because - as I write this, I am also working on breaking a few SOTA ribbons in Natural Language Processing.

It’s LSTM-based, with other really cool bits, and a few dense linear layers at the end. Those last layers used tanh as activation functions because - well - no reason. It was just my go-to since LSTM uses them internally and I like the way their equation looks.

The model wasn’t doing well, and my hunch was the tanh’s may be the problem. My other hunch was that x^2 would work better (for reasons best left for another day.)

I put the x^2 functions in, and googled around why nobody uses polynomials as activation functions. All I found was this question.

So I wrote this answer, while the model was running.

I just checked.

The x^2 function is working much, much better than tanh did.


Jan 18, 2020

During the Cold War, were the Soviet Union and United States rival superpowers?

Yea.


Feb 2, 2020

If 4a² + b² = 16 and ab =2, how do I solve (2a+ b) ²?

First expand the term (2a+b)*(2a+b) using F.O.I.L. (distribution of multiplication over addition.)

Now look at the first two equations you were given. Back at the expansion you just did. Back at the first two equations.

You got this.


Feb 2, 2020

How do I put on an N95 mask properly?

There’s a trick to it that all the instructions I’ve read fail to mention. First, the standard instructions :

OK, the last part - checking for air leaks while exhaling (positive pressure) and inhaling (negative pressure.) What’s missing is just how to I correct any air leaks ?

You do this mainly by tightening the straps. It’s not obvious that this is possible, given the straps are just stapled to the mask.

Just pull on the strap until it slides through the staple. The rubber is tough and won’t break, the staple allows the strap to slip through.

I’ve found that doing this and pinching the metal nose-bridge is all it takes to get a good seal. (If you’re a guy you need to be clean shaven first.)


Feb 3, 2020

After each heavy campaign at our company, almost all software developers ask for a salary raise. If we don't approve, they will resign. What's wrong with them?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Notice they don’t ask during a heavy campaign. They’re waiting till things have cooled down, and their departure would be least disruptive to business.

And afer they have just proven their value.

You’re paying them the raises to keep them from leaving. Not because you’re generous. You know replacing them is expensive and risky. That if you don’t pay them more, another company will.

You’re no fool.

Neither are they.


Feb 6, 2020

How does a decision tree choose the proper threshold to split on? I understand that each split maximizes the information gain, but I am uncertain as to which thresholds are iterated over for each feature in order to determine the optimal split.

The ideal split cleaves the data in half.


Feb 9, 2020

What are we going to do next time we go to the moon?

Build a gas station.

Ice has been discovered at the lunar poles. If we can get a nuclear reactor going, which uses electrolysis to separate out H2 and O2 - that’s rocket fuel.

Most importantly, it’s rocket fuel already liberated from Earth’s deep ‘gravity well’. Without such an off-earth fuel depot, each gallon of fuel takes much more than a million gallons to get into orbit.

Then we could ship the fuel off to the Martian surface. Now a manned martian mission is gassed up for the return trip (and has a huge store of O2 for breathing.)


Feb 12, 2020

The slope of the line represented by the equation 2 (x − 3) − 6y = 10 is equal to what?

Quora is the slowest possible way to get your math homework done.


Feb 20, 2020

Will Google+ attempt a second try to unseat Facebook in the near future?

No. The first failure showed that : You can build a better Facebook. That won’t break the network effects holding users there.

Since then, another fact emerged. “Social search” - whatever that was supposed to mean - was a dud. What your friends are searching isn’t really a valuable signal to you, the consumer, when you search.

And people don’t like it and block these trackers like crazy.

G+ wasn’t a Bad Try. It was a Good Try at a Staggeringly Stupid Thing.

The lesson is not to try harder. It’s to be less stupid.


Feb 28, 2020

Are N95 masks effective in preventing the transmission of the coronavirus?

Obviously.

Governments are anxious about shortages of these masks, and are in full ‘messaging’ mode - using back-channel persuasion to get their own propaganda broadcast in the guise of independent news coverage. The message is : don’t buy a mask.

Their reason for this is simple : they fucked up. Developed countries routinely hold drills to practice for a pandemic. They stock strategic reserves of everything from insulin to antivirals and even cash to prop up the stock market. They plan the deployment of field hospitals, food distribution, crematoria and so on.

Here in the US, Congress wrote a blank check to make sure we were well stocked, Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 - Wikipedia . Enough N95 masks for all health-care workers in the event of a pandemic crisis were not only paid for; their purchase was legally mandated.

That didn’t happen. Now the government has to compete on the open market to buy them. Which they are doing. But it’s rough going.

A single N95 respirator retailed for about $1.50 before the outbreak. As of this morning (Feb 28, 2020) on eBay , they were going for $30-50 each.

So the government very much wants to lower demand for those respirators, just long enough so it can buy up the stocks it should have had in place years ago. Hence the messaging.

If this sounds paranoid, you can easily see for yourself. Search google news for the question “Are N95 masks effective?”. You will find the same 5 or so answers, endlessly repeated. All these answers are self-evident nonsense. I’ve collected them here.

“No because they have to fit tightly and most people will put them on wrong.”

You dodged the question - I asked if they worked.

You only need them if caring for the sick.”

Didn’t ask who needs them. Asked you if they work.

“They are uncomfortable to wear for long periods, so …”

OK, again - not hearing an answer. You do seem suspiciously eager …

They aren’t 100% effective.”

Is anything ever? You really don’t want to answer this, do you?

The sight of you wearing them may create fear and panic among those who don’t have them.”

And that’s my problem - how ?

Our healthcare workers need them.”

Ahhhh. Finally. The truth. And you answered my question - albeit unintentionally. Because there is one and only one reason your healthcare workers would need them :

The goddamn things work.


Mar 3, 2020

What are some of the most interesting solutions to the Fermi Paradox?

I’ve got a new one!

It’s a simple but surprising twist on time dilation. We start with a question :

What is the bleakest reality to confront an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?

While it’s hard to predict what an advanced alien technology would be capable of, we do know they are still constrained to the same laws of physics as us.

In those laws, we encounter an absolute disaster : No object can travel faster than the speed of light (the C-limit.)

Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If an ETI on the other side sends a message to Earth, they must wait 200,000 years for a potential reply.

To the best of our knowledge, no alien race - no matter how advanced - can beat the C-limit. A few possible solutions to this have been floated, especially a Wormhole - Wikipedia in space-time. But we’ve never observed one and don’t know if it is possible.

OK, so here comes the twist. There is a way an alien race can cheat the C-limit without breaking it : Their entire civilization migrates to a reference frame where time goes by much more slowly.

No wormholes, no new physics - just standard General Relativity. I’ll get to how it’s done in a minute, for now just imagine an alien race can magically slow time on their home world by a factor of 100x.

With the new reference-frame comes a new perspective, and a new possibility : The speed of light has increased by 100-fold. A round-trip message to Earth takes 2,000 years, not 200,000.

It is the same for physical exploration. They can travel to Earth and return to their home world where only 2,000 years have elapsed.

While to us they appear slowed by a 100x, their subjective experience is that of surging into the future at 100x speed.

Now the galaxy awaits their exploration.

OK, how would they manage this time dilation ? I go into details in this paper - https://osf.io/me6sf/

To summarize the paper, if you examine various possibilities - you arrive at only one: The civilization exists in very near orbit to the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the galaxy’s center.

This is (the paper argues) really the only place where such a time dilation would be feasible. When we dig into the physics, a number of happy accidents occur that help us to detect such a structure.

The orbit is very exotic. It would have to be in the region where no natural satellite can hold orbit, between the Photon Sphere and the Last Stable Orbit.

The period of the orbit is easy to find. The paper calculates it (it’s within 1% of the orbital period of the Photon Sphere.)

So. The time-dilation hypothesis offers the following things :

It explains the apparent absence of ETI’s : An advanced and curious race would migrate as soon as possible to near orbit around a SMBH.

It suggests where to look : toward the SMBHs at a galaxy’s center (the Milky Way’s is called Sagittarius-A*).

It suggests how to filter the signal. An SMBH creates enormous radio noise, but a time-dilated civilization has an known orbital period. We can then calculate the expected doppler shift that would result in any signal they emit. The result is much like an FM radio signal that can be detected through the radio noise.

All this stuff is laid out in detail in the paper which I just finished (Feb 20, 2020), and which I’m anxious for people to read. https://osf.io/me6sf/


Mar 3, 2020

What are some theories on why we haven't been visited by aliens yet?

II’ve got a new one!

It’s a simple but surprising twist on time dilation. We start with a question :

What is the bleakest reality to confront an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?

While it’s hard to predict what an advanced alien technology would be capable of, we do know they are still constrained to the same laws of physics as us.

In those laws, we encounter an absolute disaster : No object can travel faster than the speed of light (the C-limit.)

Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If an ETI on the other side sends a message to Earth, they must wait 200,000 years for a potential reply.

To the best of our knowledge, no alien race - no matter how advanced - can beat the C-limit. A few possible solutions to this have been floated, most notably a Wormhole - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole) in space-time. But we’ve never observed one of these and don’t know if they are possible.

OK, so here comes the twist. There is a way an alien race can cheat the C-limit without breaking it : Their entire civilization migrates to a reference frame where time goes by much more slowly.

No wormholes, no new physics - just standard General Relativity. I’ll get to how it’s done in a minute, for now just imagine an alien race can magically slow time on their home world by a factor of 100x.

With the new reference-frame comes a new perspective, and a new possibility : The travel-time of light to distant worlds decreases 100-fold. A round-trip message to Earth takes 2,000 years, not 200,000.

It is the same for physical exploration. They can travel to Earth and return to their home world where only 2,000 years have elapsed.

While to us they appear slowed by a 100x, their subjective experience is that of surging into the future at 100x speed. There is nothing illusory about this; their reference frame has an equal claim to ‘reality’ as any other.

Now the galaxy awaits their exploration.

OK, how would they manage this time dilation ? I go into details in this paper - https://osf.io/me6sf/

To summarize the paper, if you examine various possibilities - you arrive at only one: The civilization exists in very near orbit to the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the galaxy’s center.

This is (the paper argues) really the only place where such a time dilation would be feasible. When we dig into the physics, a number of happy accidents occur that help us to detect such a structure.

The orbit is very exotic. It would have to be in the region where no natural satellite can hold orbit, between the Photon Sphere and the Last Stable Orbit.

The period of the orbit is easy to find. The paper calculates it (it’s within 1% of the orbital period of the Photon Sphere.)

So. The time-dilation hypothesis offers the following things :

It explains the apparent absence of ETI’s : An advanced and curious race would migrate as soon as possible to near orbit around a SMBH.

It suggests where to look : toward the SMBHs at a galaxy’s center (for the Milky Way that is Sagittarius-A*).

It suggests how to filter the signal. An SMBH creates enormous radio noise, but a time-dilated civilization has a known orbital period (see paper). We can then calculate the expected doppler shift that would occur for any signal they emit. The result is much like an FM radio signal that can be detected through the radio noise.

All this stuff is laid out in detail in the paper which I just finished (Feb 20, 2020), and which I’m anxious for people to read. (https://osf.io/me6sf/)


Mar 5, 2020

Why do we still have a delegate system of voting as opposed to just relying on the popular vote?

Two reasons :

The Founding Fathers were wary that a Tyrant would manage to fool voters into electing him. So the electoral college acts as an intermediary, and last-minute sanity check on the vote.

It’s a vestige of America’s original sin of slavery. From the very start the North and South were chafing on the issue of slavery. Thomas Jefferson had a clause in the first constitution abolishing slavery, but was convinced to remove it in order to get Southern states to ratify the constitution. The Southern states remained reluctant, fearing that due to their low population the North would invoke its numerical advantage to free the slaves. The final compromise - giving each state equal representation in the Senate, population-based representation in the House, a minimum of two electoral votes no matter low the population, and the final decision how to allocate its delegates (hence winner-take-all) were all needed to placate the slave states in order to stitch the Union together.


Mar 11, 2020

What’s something you can’t believe you had to explain to another adult?

I was informed by my health insurance provider that my coverage was revoked because they were unable to verify my home address.

This notice was sent by mail. To my home address.

It took 3 in-person visits, letter in hand, and 4 months to convince them that I was still at the same address that their mailroom had no trouble finding.


Mar 11, 2020

If 40-70% of the population will be infected with COVID-19 eventually, is there any point in trying to evade it? Wouldn’t I be better off to get it early and build immunity?

Oh - no no no. Nyet. Nein.

Negative.

10–20% of those who get sick need hospitalization, usually for ‘respiratory support’. The US and other countries are right now ramping up their ‘surge capacity’ for such treatment - meaning the number of patients they can treat at the same time. Most likely, this will take the form of field hospitals - arenas and other large areas with cots and O2 supplies.

90% or more of those will survive. Unless they can’t get that respiratory support. If all the cases come at once - possibly 100 million across the US, the surge exceeds even the field hospitals, there’s no way most of those people can be treated.

This is a nightmare scenario where the US could see 30 million dead instead of 2 million. Our single best way to avoid that is to slow transmission of the virus; for each of us to avoid infection as long as possible. Virologists are calling this ‘flattening the curve’. It’s the most important thing we should all be doing.

The Canadians just made an announcement on this here, https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-covid-19-coronavirus-spread-hospital-surge-capacity-ventilators-1.5493178

And that’s just O2 masks. While a vaccine is a long way off (perhaps too long to avoid universal infection), at any time treatment could be discovered that reduces the severity of the symptoms and/or the infectivity. Another thing worth waiting for.


Mar 19, 2020

What is the meaning of console application? (well find these in IDE's)

What a great question. And one which begs a larger question : What is a computer language for ?

The GUI paradigm (point, click, windows, icons) is so ubiquitous that we are often completely unaware of it. Unaware of any paradigm at all. Unaware of its limitations.

Let’s explore the limitations of a GUI. We’ll sort of break in through the back door and first examine : What are its strengths?

Because people accept limitations only in return for greater freedoms. To see what is surrendered, it’s sometimes easiest to see first what is gained.

Suppose you have a desktop computer. Sitting next to you is a person with whom you don’t share a spoken or written language. Maybe they speak another language, are an alien, are deaf or you’re mute - whatever. Play along.

They’ve also never used a computer. Your goal is to teach the other person how to email a picture to somebody.

Let’s say a there’s a picture of your dog on your desktop. You want to send it to your uncle. Your dog is also in the room with you.

You can easily imagine a sort of charades with your partner, where by pointing you indicate, “this is my dog. Here’s a picture on my desktop.”

Further, holding up your electric bill, “See this envelope?” Pointing to email icon on desktop. Make throwing motion.

Opening email, bringing up uncle’s face, dragging photo over - this would be arduous, sure - but in a little while your partner would completely understand and be able to reproduce the feat.

That’s the power and beauty of a GUI. Using only our visual intuition - our most highly developed skill that transcends all cultures - we can perform a great many critical tasks.

But it has a hard limit. Suppose now that your uncle has a picture of your dog, you realize that your aunt Edith might want a copy. The thing is, they were recently divorced, and she reverted to her maiden name. She has a new email address.

You could ask the uncle for it, but that could be a touchy subject. Best to ask his daughter - your cousin, for your aunt’s address.

Try explaining that to your partner.

Not a chance in hell. What would be two sentences of english on a post-it note wouldn’t get communicated in a week of charades.

For that you need language. Either English or Unix or Python.

A GUI is like walking. A natural, universal, pleasant way to get around. But where it fails, the failure is absolute and requires a solution (like a bicycle) which is unnatural, complex, and takes time to learn.


Mar 20, 2020

Why did Senator Richard Burr warn wealthy members of a business club that a pandemic was coming 5 weeks ago?

I’m no epidemiologist. I have no medical training whatsoever.

I hold no academic credential beyond a BS in Math.

But I’ve always had an interest in epidemics. So I read up on them. Pretty much all of them.

1918. The black death. The annual flu.

How they start and spread. The ones that peter out, like SARS and the 76 Swine Flu.

How governments and people react. And fail to.

I’ve seen lots of new epidemics start during my lifetime. But never - not once - was I ever so bold and so certain as to predict an imminent pandemic to everyone I know.

Not once.

I watched the news from Wuhan with the same interest I received similar news of other outbreaks. But then I saw something I had never seen before. Every dam, every firewall to global pandemic fell in rapid succession :

It’s aerosolized.

It lives on surfaces for > 1 hr.

There is person-to-person transmission.

There is person-to-person transmission far beyond the epicentre.

It has an R0 greater than 2.

Most of its victims are vigorous, asymptomatic carriers.

It is not slowed by warmer climates.

It overcomes the strenuous precautions of hospital staff and infects them as well.

It’s arriving at airports.

I plotted the growth curve. Looked at the semi-log graph. Straight as an arrow, the steady exponential approach of a pandemic that would soon be outside my door.

Not 5 but 7 1/2 weeks ago I posted this to Facebook,

My partner and I immediately bought protective gear, stocked up on food, and made plans for school closing, etc.

A couple weeks later, 5 weeks ago today, I updated :

And my most recent from March 7,

As you can see, the first 2 aren’t far off, and that last one is a bull’s eye (allowing for delays induced by social distancing and other countermeasures.)

I wasn’t concerned that my calculations were in sharp disagreement with the media and governments, who were full of assurances.

That’s what they do. What they always have done. I read those same articles and press releases from 1918.

My brother said to me recently, “Your math skills are scary.” And I was very gratified to get a PM from a family that took precautions based on my early prediction.

But I’m not prescient. I’m not paranoid. I don’t “always says these things” - again, I had never said anything like it before. I don’t have access to secret intel. I can’t even work a fucking microscope. My math is very simple.

I’ve just read this story before.

I know how it ends.

The governments of the world will now, I expect, do their best. They will say many things: valuable and urgent and reliable things.

But don’t let them tell you this was a surprise.


Mar 23, 2020

Isn’t the great proof the moon landing was not a hoax that the Russians would have called out the US if it were?

Bull’s eye. From a post I made to medium,

What evidence suggests that the Moon landing was a hoax?

There’s a lot of evidence that can be gathered to form a persuasive case that the moon landing was faked. I’ll try to give a fly-over :
Photographic anomalies : You can google these, there are a bazillion of them. Many involve suspicious shadow directions or lack of shadows altogether.
The Van Allen Belt radiation : There is a very dangerous level of radiation in the Van Allen Belt — a great swath of ionized particles held in place by the Earth’s magnetic field. There was no shielding for the astronauts to protect them from this.
Suspicious astronaut deaths : Aside from the three that died in the ground test of the Mercury program, another seven died in various random accidents like car crashes.
Technical limitations of the 1960’s. A handful of aeronautics engineers from the 1960’s, knowledgeable in the state of the art, vehemently assert that — sure, we could get into low Earth orbit, but were decades away from landing men on the moon and returning again.
Most of the evidence falls into these 4 categories.
Just for a sample, here’s a photographic anomaly (it’s high res, feel free to zoom in) -
So, if the surface is “fine and powdery” as Armstrong described — how come the rocket didn’t blast a small crater in that surface — and how come no dust came down to land on those shiny metal feet? And so on.
We could do this all day. If we did, the case would build and build until a reasonable person would find themselves pretty well persuaded.
Did we land on the moon?
Of course we fucking did.
None of the anomalies hold up to cross-examination. There’s no crater because it’s a fine and powdery surface in a vacuum.
If they were landing on gravel in earth’s atmosphere, a crater would be created as the gravel particles would encounter air resistance, forming the walls and characteristic ‘lip’ of a crater. But this is more like landing on baby powder.
If you throw a handful of baby powder in your kitchen, it will fly maybe a couple feet before landing on the floor in a door-mat sized mess.
Do the same thing in a vacuum and the powder will fly away like a baseball, landing a hundred feet away.
Do it in a vacuum — in lunar gravity — and the powder lands a thousand feet away.
The dust was blown way, way clear. This also explains why the landing gear of the lunar module is pristine.
If you examine — and then vigorously cross-examine — every piece of the large body of evidence — you will emerge thoroughly convinced that the landing was real.
And I have a short-cut for you. We had an enemy at the time, the USSR. Nothing — and I mean nothing — would have delighted the Soviets more than to expose the lying capitalist bastard conspiracy to rob the human race of their greatest moment in exploration.
They were watching us. They were monitoring our radio transmissions. They themselves had orbited the moon. If any American scientist or propagandist suggested we try to fake the mission, that idea would get shot down vigorously as the threat of being exposed far outweighed the benefit of pulling it off.
And exposed we would have been. It turns out the Apollo 11 astronauts had company. As they were orbiting the moon preparing to land, another capsule from earth was also orbiting — the Soviet Luna 15 probe.
The Soviets were open with the US about their plans to launch the probe — both sides wanted to ensure neither vessel interfered with the other’s communication.
The exact purpose of the probe, however, was not made known to us. Our astronauts went ahead and landed. Shortly after that, the Luna 15 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, 500 miles away from our landing site in the Sea of Tranquility.
Previous Soviet probes had taken photographs of the dark side of the moon. So that thing was certainly bristling with cameras and radio antennae.
By sending up that probe, the Soviets had put us on notice that faking the moon landing was not an option.
In 1969 human beings from planet Earth first stepped foot on the Moon, in defiance of long odds, deadly radiation, mortal danger and … lingering incredulity.

May 1, 2020

Can you show me your work/creation/art that you did/doing during this lockdown time?

I made this (2 min) short video about the pandemic,


May 1, 2020

How controversial exactly are the atomic bombings in WWII? For the most part they are recognized as a strategic necessity, but I keep coming across people who insist otherwise.

The use of atomic bombs remains controversial outside the US. At the time, within the US military, it was also intensely controversial. There were shouting matches and threats of resignations.

The cover story that is still presented in US history is that Hiroshima was a military target, and that ends the debate. They never - ever - show you what I’m about to show you.

Here’s where the military targets were in Hiroshima. Almost all of them were coastal.

Here’s the bomb damage from Enola Gay, which perfectly hit its aiming point,

You can, if you insist, tell me the bomb on Hiroshima was for the greater good. Just don’t try to tell me it was a military target.

The bomb was deliberately targeted to miss military targets and aimed directly at the population center to maximize civilian casualties.

We can disagree as to the morality of what we did. But lying about it is the ultimate admission of wrong-doing.


May 1, 2020

Do aliens really exist?

I think Aliens (Extraterrestrial Intelligence) do exist, and I had a recent idea about why we can’t detect them.

I propose we can’t see them because we’re looking in the wrong time-frame. We haven’t fully considered General Relativity from the perspective of an advanced alien intelligence thousands of light-years away.

I took some time to write this idea up carefully in this paper, https://osf.io/me6sf. (It’s mercifully brief at 6 pages, and reader criticism is most welcome!).

Here’s a summary :

—-

We start with a question :

What is the bleakest reality to confront an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?

While it’s hard to predict what an advanced alien technology would be capable of, we do expect them to be constrained by the same laws of physics as us.

In those laws, we encounter an absolute disaster : No object can travel faster than the speed of light (the C-limit.)

Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If an ETI on the other side sends a message to Earth, they must wait 200,000 years for a potential reply.

To the best of our knowledge, no alien race - no matter how advanced - can beat the C-limit. A few possible solutions to this have been floated, especially a Wormhole - Wikipedia (Wormhole - Wikipedia) in space-time. But we’ve never observed one and don’t know if it is possible.

OK, so here comes the twist. There is a way an alien race can cheat the C-limit without breaking it : Their entire civilization migrates to a reference frame where time goes by much more slowly.

No wormholes, no new physics - just standard General Relativity. I’ll get to how it’s done in a minute, for now just imagine an alien race can magically slow time on their home world by a factor of 100x.

With the new reference-frame comes a new perspective, and a new possibility : The transit time for a beam of light across the milky way has been reduced by a factor of 100x . A round-trip message to Earth takes 2,000 years, not 200,000.

It is the same for physical exploration. They can travel to Earth at near-C and return to their home world where only 2,000 years have elapsed.

While to us they appear slowed by 100x, their subjective experience is that of surging into the future at 100x speed.

Now the galaxy awaits their exploration.

OK, how would they manage this time dilation ? I go into details in this paper - https://osf.io/me6sf/

To summarize the paper, if you examine various possibilities - you arrive at only one: The civilization exists in very near orbit to the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the galaxy’s center.

This is (the paper argues) really the only place where such a time dilation would be feasible. When we dig into the physics, a number of happy accidents occur that help us to detect such a structure.

The orbit is exotic. It would have to be in the region where no natural satellite can hold orbit, between the Photon Sphere and the Last Stable Orbit.

The period of the orbit is easy to find. The paper calculates it (it’s within 1% of the orbital period of the Photon Sphere.)

So. The time-dilation hypothesis offers the following things :

It explains the apparent absence of ETI’s : An advanced and curious race would migrate as soon as possible to near orbit around a SMBH.

It suggests where to look : toward the SMBHs at a galaxy’s center (the Milky Way’s is called Sagittarius-A*).

It suggests how to filter the signal. An SMBH creates enormous radio noise, but a time-dilated civilization has an known orbital period. We can then calculate the expected doppler shift that would result in any signal they emit. The result is much like an FM radio signal that can be detected through the radio noise.

Again, all this stuff is laid out in detail in the paper which I recently finished (Feb 20, 2020). Reader criticism is most welcome!

(cross-posted from Christopher Reiss's answer to What are some of the most interesting solutions to the Fermi Paradox?)


May 2, 2020

Why are people still so comfortable with toxic masculinity?

The word ‘prejudice’ is rooted in the term ‘pre-judge’. As in to draw conclusions about a person, before learning about them personally, based solely on their membership in some class like gender, ethnicity, or skin color.

“Toxic masculinity” manages, in just two words, to invoke the very prejudice it claims to protest.


May 3, 2020

Why do high performers fail to get promoted?

Lots of good points here - another is that - it’s not always a failure.

A lot of companies and even government agencies have wised up to the Peter Principle: What You Need to Know which states that good workers get moved up the org chart until they stop being good.

Someone doing just great at their job, may just want to keep doing great at it. Sure, offer them more money or more perks. Better still - ask them what they want ! In my experience about 1/2 of star performers won’t ask for a promotion. They’re more likely to ask that some tedium be removed from their workflow, or perhaps for an underling to join them. Just as often it’s as simple as a big window, more flex time, or fewer meetings.

For a tech. example, consider Jony Ives. We tech nerds know him as the design genius behind the iPhone. His title at apple was “Chief Design Officer”, which - sorry guys - we all know isn’t really a thing. He was really Head Designer.

Had he been ‘promoted’ to VP of Product Development or (g-d forbid) CEO while Jobs hung on to Chairman it would have been disastrous for him, for Apple, and the world.

Another example from recent headlines is Dr. Anthony Fauci. This guy should be head of the CDC, right? Or even WHO!

But that’s not his thing. He made a name for himself going after emerging infectious diseases like AIDS in the 80’s. He’s director of an arm of the NIH called NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). He has served in that role since 1984. He’s considered by many in the AIDS community to be something of a hero, and has been the go-to guy under a half-dozen presidential administrations when a new disease breaks out.

35 years. No promotion. Last week a reporter asked him, “Who do you want to portray you on Saturday Night Live?” Fauci joked, “Brad Pitt.”

Four days later that’s exactly what happened.


May 3, 2020

Do you agree that people who lived from the 1950s to early 2000s were very lucky to survive the major pandemics, 2 wars, and 1970s economic meltdowns?

Good Lord !

There is one thing you’re lucky to have that they lacked. Youtube. You can pull up a documentary on any topic you like. I’d like to suggest a few topics :

Polio

1968 riots.

Tuberculosis.

1957 and 1968 flu pandemics.

The Cold War.

Stagflation and the Arab Oil Embargo

The Little Rock Nine.


May 4, 2020

Was the US on the defensive in WWII?

Yes, at first. Our initial encounters with the Japanese Imperial Navy and the Desert Fox were disastrous.

Even in the epic-in-hindsight victory at the Battle of Midway, the first two waves of American planes were just swept from the skies by enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The battle hinged on a few lucky breaks like codebreakers managing to get advanced warning of the Midway attack, a stray dive-bomber that went off-course and stumbled upon a carrier group, and so forth that enabled the final and fatal attack of American dive-bombers.


May 4, 2020

It is often said that Admiral Yamamoto understood war with the US was folly since he studied at Harvard and knew how strong America was with its industries and resources. Did any German generals have a similar experience and opinion?

In 1939, Franz Halder, the Nazi Army Chief of Staff, had a back-channel talk with Raymond Geist, American Consul General at the US embassy in Berlin. Geist passed the conversation up to the US Secretary of State : GHDI - Document, Raymond Geist’s Report on his Conversation with Franz Halder, April 13, 1939.

Halder confided to Geist that the Nazi military was essentially powerless to blunt Hitler’s aggression. He feared that Germany was setting off a global conflict which would result in “America … throwing the weight of her resources and support on the side of Germany’s potential enemies.” This, he felt, would lead not only to German defeat, but also to the near-destruction of all Europe. (Nailed it.)

Halder was relieved of command shortly after America and Germany began a shooting war. He took some initial steps - twice - toward a plot to assassinate Hitler but backed out before they developed.

After the Nazi defeat, the Allies made no charges against Halder at the Nuremberg Trials, where he testified against some of the defendants.


May 10, 2020

What's the best advice you've ever given someone?

I was working for Nokia in the wake of the Microsoft invasion (AKA the “Elopocalypse.”

I remember this recent MIT graduate who had worked there for just a year. He was just grinding through bug fixes. This kid was super-bright, but there was too much rigid organizational maze-works, too much panic, and too little time for anyone to realize what he was capable of and to unleash his mind.

One day he walked up to me, in order to ask for some advice. This was a bit odd; we didn’t know each other that well. I don’t know if he picked me for some reason, or was polling a number of people. He asked me this:

“I just got an offer to work for a little startup back in Cambridge. I don’t know if I should take it. It’s less money and who knows if it’ll still exist in 6 months.”

Is it cool?”

“Oh yea! It’s an app to follow college sports. A great intersection of my interests.”

“And the people? Does the team in place have a history of both technical and business success? Do you like them?”

“Yes on all counts.”

“Are you married with kids or anything like that? Any financial dependents?”

“No. So - what should I do?”

I turned to directly face him. I did not bother to lower my voice, even though we were surrounded by coworkers.

“Run screaming from this place. Run this very minute. Don’t clean out your desk, don’t give notice. Jump in your car and don’t get out till you get to Cambridge to announce your acceptance in person.”

He only said, “Thanks” and quickly walked away. He did give notice, but I think he filled it with vacation time.

Two years later I saw the company in the paper. Their app had been a hit and they were just bought out for a handsome sum.

I was a little surprised. I had assumed he would join the company, and have himself a magnificent failure from which he’d emerge no richer but with his mind, skills and confidence expanded.

The payday was icing on the cake. I never saw him after that conversation. I think I prefer it that way, it’s not like I knew how well it would turn out. Would be awkward if he felt compelled to thank me for my ‘sage advice.’

I do hope, though, that he remembers the conversation. Somehow I think he does.

I mostly hope he passes along the story I just told you.


May 11, 2020

How many ping pong balls can fit in a limo?

This type of question is meant to test your command of laziness.

Most people who know how to calculate volumes can calculate a (numerically) good answer. But most people will waste a lot of time trying to make the calculation more precise. Which is useless because you aren’t told the exact dimensions of the limo.

So any effort beyond trying to get within a factor of 2x and 3x is wasted. Expending that effort is a sign that you know how to solve problems, but you don’t know why or when.

This question takes other forms - it’s almost always ping pong balls, but the limo is sometimes an airplane. Or a bus. That sort of thing.

In order to showcase your mastery of laziness to the questioner - first ,what not to do: Don’t google the dimensions of a limousine. Or a ping pong ball, for that matter. Don’t google anything. No calculators either. No writing. In fact, let’s wander over to the window and do this standing up.

The choice of ping-pong ball and limousine is deliberate. We’ve all held a ping-pong ball. We’ve all been inside a limousine (or at least a car.) Variants of the question (airplane, bus, etc) will substitute items you’ve also encountered personally.

No need to measure. The ping pong ball has a diameter about equal your thumb. About an inch.

For the limo, use your body and your imagination to estimate the volume. The roof of the limo comes up to about your chest, right? OK, 4 feet.

How wide is it? If you had too much to drink and had to lay down on the back seat, you’d fit but just barely. OK, about 6 feet.

For the length, from the rear seat to the driver, how many body-lengths would you measure? Here it depends just how ‘stretch’ you went for the event, but about 3 body-lengths for a more modest limo.

Now pick up a pen, but not to calculate. Just to write the answer. The volume of the limo is (3x6ft) x 6ft x 4 ft = 20x25 = 5x100 = 500 cubic feet.

There’s 12x12 ~ 150 ping pong balls per cubic foot. So 500x150 ~ 100,000 ping pong balls.

The asker may pose at this point, “How would you refine that estimate?” Approach the question with caution. Offer only, “We could get more precise measurements of the ball and the limo.”

Now they may ask, “OK. Let’s do that then. Let’s look up those numbers, a precise limo model, and really knock this outta the park.”

The answer is, “No. That’s a complete waste of time. You know I can calculate volumes and you know I can discern when and when not to. Next question.”

There’s more than one way to flunk a test of applied laziness.


May 14, 2020

What would a layperson misunderstand about US military procurement?

News often reports on outrageous expenditures, like the infamous the famous $600 toilet seat from way back in the 80’s.

What gets lost is that toilet seat was worth it. Nuclear submarines are very demanding to build for. That seat has to be totally silent in order to keep stealth. It’s also got to be non conductive, non radio reflective, non warping, custom shaped and so on.

Non stories like the toilet seat make it possible to rob the Pentagon blind. Make up some non existent but highly technical thing like a “Cherenkov shield” which, I dunno, prevents the whole crew by being blinded to a torpedo strike to the nuclear generator. Charge em 2 million bucks for a shower curtain draped in the reactor room.


Jun 6, 2020

Has Trump reached a fatal inflection point in his presidency, one from which he can no longer recover?

I think so, but not for the simple reason that he’s been a) one of the most unlucky presidents in history in terms of crises and b) made these crises far worse due to a brace of painfully obvious personal flaws. His base just doesn’t care about these things; they do not yield to facts.

Rather, I think voter turnout will be the factor that blows him way, way out of office in 2020. High turnout leans Democrat. 2016 saw the lowest turnout since the 90’s.

But in 2020 - one thing is certain: A whole lot of people have some strong feelings about a whole lot of things. I think voter turnout is going to set a 50 year, if not a 100 year record.

That’s not a blue wave - that’s a blue tsunami headed not just for the Trump administration but also for his enablers in the Senate.


Jun 10, 2020

What is the difference between epochs and batch sizes in machine learning?

An epoch is a single run of the entire data set. Models typically reread that set a number of times, hence multiple epochs.

At the end of each epoch, typically, your model gives metrics on how its doing (validation scores.)

A batch is a rather arbitrary construct; it’s a bite-size piece of the data-set that’s usually chosen to make maximum use of parallel processing in a GPU/MPP. Batch size is sometimes taken to be just 1.

The batch isn’t entirely without ‘semantic’ though - the loss function is usually defined to map N batch elements to a single number (loss). So the batch size effects the ‘granularity’ at which the algorithm operates. For this reason, batch-size can reduce over-fitting. So you shouldn’t just choose whatever fits on the GPU or grab the ‘128’ value from the sample code without giving it a second look.


Jun 11, 2020

How does one show that the function f(x,y) = -\log(xy) is convex or not ?

Take partial derivatives in both X- and Y-dimensions. When do they increase?


Jun 24, 2020

Has anyone come up with any effective ways of persuading tailgating drivers behind you to stop doing so?

This trick goes back generations, my dad taught it to me.

First, make the tailgater think you’re a nervous driver. As you approach, say, some traffic in front of you or a merging lane, lightly tap your brakes and slow down - forcing them to slow down.

Now you’ve got their attention. On your braking lights. Now turn your headlights on as you hit the gas. Your tail lights look almost exactly like your brake lights. Primed to think you ride the brake anyway, they will brake themselves while you speed up, putting a block distance between you and just maybe - reminding them to be a safer and more courteous driver.

This doesn’t work at night, of course. But that Hazard’s light is so easy to hit by mistake …


Jun 24, 2020

What one thing does Trump have that’s bigger than Obama?

A problem.


Jun 26, 2020

What's the best song you can link that you're positive 99% of people haven't heard before?

“Texas” by the New York artist, Jackie Kamel. Released a few months ago.

Also, remember that song “What if God was one of us?” Kinda lame. But the singer/writer, Joan Osborne, did some earlier work that never got noticed including this awesome track :


Jun 29, 2020

Do you agree with those who say America didn't lose the Vietnam War but instead "they withdrew"?

That’s kind of what losing is. The British said the same about the American Revolution.

There is some truth to it, in the sense of the brand of total war waged in WW II, where nations put their full industrial and military might into the fight (and obtained credit by any and all means possible) - it wasn’t defeat in that sense. The enemy flag wasn’t raised over our capitol, rather - we reached a breaking point which broke our will to fight. Same with the British in the American Revolution.

However, to call this “withdrawal” can only be described as euphemistic denial. All the objectives for which the war was waged were ceded to the enemy. If we had the chance to do it over again, we wouldn’t have. If that’s not defeat, I can’t imagine what is.

There is, however, another way to look at this. There are times when a nation goes to war with good intentions, but not good understanding. They go off to fight a war that shouldn’t be fought at all. By the time America evacuated Saigon - similar to the time Great Britain evacuated Yorktown - both powers had largely come to the realization that this was a war that not only cannot be won, but more importantly should not have been fought.

In that sense “withdrawal” might be used to imply not only a military reversal, but also a change in heart.


Jun 29, 2020

What can we learn from Donald Trump and apply to our own lives?

Never let your ability to get a job exceed your ability to do a job.


Jul 1, 2020

What is the name of the order that allows a US president to require a business to produce something because of a national emergency?

That’s the Defense Production Act. That law empowers the President to, by Executive Order, compel a company to divert their production toward the defense of the US.


Jul 4, 2020

What are some good recipes for Sourdough Bread?

I came up with this by trial and error (mostly the latter) during the pandemic (note the name.) Nearly fool-proof and certified awesome. This is a bit wordy, as I try to add some check-points to keep the newbie on track :

Pale Horse Sourdough Bread recipe.

I'm not much of a baker, and I found bread-making to be a very glitchy and uncertain process. Sometimes it would come out dense as concrete or wouldn't rise at all. Other times it would be wet and mushy. Occasionally it would come out OK but then I couldn't duplicate the feat.

I tried all sorts of things like using a water pan, trying to make a Dutch Oven, different temperatures and so on. Nothing worked.

Then I stumbled upon this technique when I fell asleep while making bread. After an 8 hour dozing, I figured the bread was ruined. I didn't want to waste precious flour, though, so I went ahead on the off-chance the result wasn't a total waste.

To my amazement it came out perfectly. Repeated trials revealed it was no fluke, it comes out awesome every time. I considered it my civic duty to write it up and share it with a world quarantine lock-down.

* Sourdough starter from fridge 130 grams (2/3 cup by volume)

* Spring water \\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t 345 grams (1 1/2 cups by volume)

* Flour \\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t\\t 460 grams (3 1/4 cups by volume)

* Salt 2 1/2 teaspoons

If you have a kitchen scale, weighing ingredients by grams is the way to go. If not, use the volume (cup) measurements - but careful with the flour. Flour can vary greatly in density depending how packed it is, to correct for this make sure it's fluffed up good with a fork when measuring.

Warm the starter up by placing a jar of it in a bowl of tap water at 100 or so degrees for 20 minutes. (No thermometer? Go by touch, 100 degree water feels tepid - neither hot nor cold when you put a finger in it.)

The starter will expand and start to become foamy. I used a black marker here to show the level rise from 20 minutes of warming :

Make sure the starter is ready to use by doing the Float Test. Pour a spoonful into the water,if it floats, you're ready to make bread! If not - it's back to the drawing board with your starter. (Maybe ask a friend for advice.)

Put starter in very large bowl. Add spring water or filtered water. (Chlorinated tap water can kill the yeast.) Mix thoroughly with whisk. Take crappy photo.

Slowly add flour, mixing as you go. Mix with spoon at first, toward the end use bare hand. (Wet your hand first w/ cold water to minimize sticking.) Don't add the salt, we won't do that til much later.

The final result should be just goopy enough that it can be poured, very slowly like honey. If yours doesn't do that, adjust with more water or more flour.

Cover with a towel and let sit on counter for an hour.

Plunge a spoon or hand into the dough, and give it a good upward stretch. (Two for extra credit.)

Wait another hour, and repeat the stretch.

OK! Nothing for you to do as the yeast comes on the job for an 8 hour shift. Just leave on counter with towel cover.

8 hours later,the dough should be showing large bubbles just under the surface. (If it isn't, try giving it some more time.)

Scatter salt on top and work in very thoroughly with bare hands. Dough will become 'punched down' (lose its volume from the rise.)

Cover again with towel and wait 1-2 hours. You should notice bubbles starting to reappear.

Time to bake! Grab a bread-pan. Preheat oven to 500. Line bread-pan with parchment paper. (You can use tinfoil instead if necessary.) Cut two pieces of parchment to fit like so :

Pour all the dough in. It'll only fill 1/3-1/2 way, that's OK. It's about to spring up like crazy.

Use a baking sheet as a cover for the breadpan. Put covered breadpan in oven for 10 minutes.

Remove cover - you'll see the dough has risen.

Bake another 20 minutes with cover off. Take breadpan out of oven, remove loaf. Lift off the parchment paper.

Lower oven temperature to 450 degrees. Place loaf directly on rack.

The crust will start to darken. Keep checking back until you've got a rich, deep brown color. About 15-25 minutes.

If you have a cooling rack, place bread on that. Otherwise just place the loaf atop a bowl or something so that air can get to the bottom. (Otherwise, the bottom can turn out soggy.)

The crust will feel solid as concrete when the bread first comes out. Not to worry, it'll soften up as the bread cools. Resist the urge to hack open your bread right away - it's not really done cooking until it cools down.

After a couple of hours, when you can comfortably handle the bread in your hands, it's ready to eat!

To store - it is best to keep your bread on the counter in a brown paper bag. Don't store it in the fridge.

If the crust is too stiff for your liking, store the loaf a few hours in a ziplock bag to soften it up. (The next time you make bread, wrap it in a damp towel the first 30 minutes of cooling for a softer crust.)

**Science info for nerds**

This recipe is different than most recipes in a few ways. The awesome power of Science has been invoked to remove steps and improve quality. (At least, this is why I think it works so well.)

**No kneading.** In many recipes, you have to knead the dough by folding and pressing it over and over. What this does is press together protein molecules in order to form gluten, which is the stuff that gives bread its structure and elasticity.

In this recipe, the dough is wetter than usual, and we're letting it ferment a long time at room temperature. The extra water allows the protein molecules to move around more easily and link up naturally. The long, warm fermentation creates expanding bubbles which stretch the dough for us. The yeast does the kneading.

**No Shaping**

Other recipes require you to hand-shape your dough into a ball or loaf just before baking. The dough is cut, shaped, and scored in order to control the shape it grows into.

Here, the dough is too wet for that. So we need a bread-pan to provide shape - but the wetness confers a big benefit : the heat is distributed more evenly. This creates a very vigorous and even "oven spring" in the first 10 minutes or so, compared with the slower and less even rise of a drier dough.

**Wait for the salt**

Other recipes add salt right away with the flour and water, or an hour or so into fermentation. But salt slows fermentation down. So we give the dough a long, warm fermentation period of 10 hours first.


Jul 5, 2020

Which is the best editor or IDE for Python?

Whoa. You guys. I have a very nice surprise for you. I only just now found out.

tldr : It’s Visual Studio Code by Microsoft (!?)

Here is what I want most in a Python editor :

It must be very, very light weight. I’m editing over here - milliseconds count when they are between keystrokes.

It’s gotta be free, open source and cross-platform. And not cross-platform at the cost of performance. By which I mean not written in Java. By which I really mean not goddamn Eclipse. Eclipse : you’re bloated, buggy, sluggish and weird.

I personally don’t care if it’s an IDE. I do all my python debugging at run-time using the code module.

Code navigation has to work. I mean really work - all the goddamn time. When I type a call to a function I want that function’s parameters to pop up without disrupting my typing. I don’t want them to suddenly disappear after a single keystroke, Atom and PyCharm. I don’t want to have to install random crap to make it work, Sublime.

It has to let me collapse nested blocks of code. (Really, Spyder?)

Visual Studio Code does all of these things astonishingly well, setting it far apart from any competitor. Don’t let the name trip you up - this is not “Microsoft Visual Studio” - the bloated and pricey IDE of yesteryear.

This is just an editor. A very, very good editor. It’s free. It’s open source. It’s amazing.

In what appears a grand olive branch to the open source developers so bitterly aggrieved under the Ballmer/Gates regime, Microsoft leaves this gem at their altar.

Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined


Jul 8

Do you think all Confederate monuments & statues should be removed from public areas in the South?

See this?

That is a war monument - a memorial to a boot. That’s right, a guy’s boot.

Enscription:

In memory of
the "most brilliant soldier" of the
Continental Army
who was desperately wounded
on this spot the sally port of
BURGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT
7th October, 1777
winning for his countrymen
the decisive battle of the
American Revolution
and for himself the rank of
Major General.

Benedict Arnold was wounded in that foot. Before he betrayed the country that raised him to manhood, before he attempted to turn over to the British the very fort he was charged with commanding (Fort Arnold - later renamed to West Point.)

When George Washington learned of this teachery, he issued a simple order : “Pin a medal to his foot. Hang the rest of him.”

The leaders of the Confederacy were traitors to the union, and their defense of slavery was a crime against humanity. The only memorial they deserve is the enduring reproach of that marble boot.


Jul 12

Which loss function should I use if I am trying to maximize the AUC(ROC) score?

The default choice is Binary Cross Entropy, while people have sometimes used various rank-loss functions as well.

But wait! There’s more! I just wrote a paper on a new one, with working PyTorch code and equations and graphs and everything. Feel free to give it a try, I’m curious to hear how people make out with it in different problem domains.

Roc-star : A more direct AUC loss function to challenge binary cross-entropy.

And yes, I’m kind of a dweeb for naming it ‘roc-star’.


Sep 2

What about the Fermi Paradox is absolutely terrifying?

No one is coming to help.


Sep 3

Is it true that if you are wearing rubber soles when you get hit by lightning you are protected? Surely if the electricity gets down from the cloud and has only one inch to go you are still in serious danger?

At risk of dodging the question for the greater good, others mention that rubber soles won’t protect you. (Nor will any other kind of insultation.)

What will protect you : Get into a car. More generally, a metal enclosure. It doesn’t matter how flimsy it is; a shed will do; so will a dumpster; even hiding under an upturned metal garbage can will completely shield you.

This creates a Faraday cage - Wikipedia . The lightening bolt with travel along the outer skin of the conductor and leave the inner portion untouched. (Yes, you can be touching the inner wall safely.)

So, rather counterintuitively, it’s not insulators that will save you. It’s surrounding yourself with a conductor. Rather than trying to block the lightening you are granting it a better path that doesn’t go through you.


Sep 6

How can the scientific community continue claiming there is no reason to even attempt to study the UFO topic scientifically, especially when UFO sightings are nearing the billion mark and world governments have studied it since the 1940s?

Well, there has actually been a huge uptick recently in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It now falls under the respectable heading of Astrobiology, and new initiatives and technology are under way like Breakthrough Listen and China’s FAST radio telescope. These efforts focus on detecting certain distant signals - radio or gravity waves - which are either deliberate messages or else an incidental result of advanced technology (technosignatures.)

But very little attention is paid to UFOs per se. For good reason, I think. Consider this : In 1894, American astronomer Percival Lowell rose to fame with his theory of alien life on Mars. Astronomers at that time were under the mistaken impression that there was liquid water flowing through canals which everywhere cut through the martian landscape.

On Earth, this was the age of great ships and seaborne navigation. Lowell envisioned that the Martians used great sailing ships to move across their planet. He further suggested that they had vast fields of hemp, for use in making rope and sails.

In hindsight, Lowell was embarassing himself by mentally exporting the world he knows to the world he does not.

About that. We still use a lot of nautical terminology to describe space travels. We travel in ships. The travelers are called astronauts. Ships are gathered into fleets.

More to the point : How do we explore new worlds? We go there. We send a ship to the moon, step outside and walk around. We’re trying very hard to get to Mars that way, meanwhile robots take our place.

While this is a perfectly sensible thing for us to do - is this how an alien race capable of interstellar travel would explore?

When we forget to pose this question, we make Lowell’s mistake about hemp and sails. When we do pose it, some fairly obvious realities assert themselves. If an alien race is capable of interstellar travel (remember, we aren’t even interplanetary yet), they are far, far ahead of us technologically.

With even a small extension of current human technology we can see there is little need to land a big ship on a planet to learn about it. Any desired information could be gleaned from quite some distance away, with the possible exception of samples of the local biology. The latter could be done with an automaton the size of a fruit-fly. Travelling in person would be rather pointless (and quite dangerous, to us if not to them.)

Unless they wished to make themselves known. In that case, their technology would enable them to do so without a trace of ambiguity. They could light up Earth’s atmosphere with a greeting, and descend upon the UN at high noon.

But as for UFOs? Radar blips coming and going - appearing eager to evade our detection? Skinny grey aliens with huge eyes who sneak around at night and are incredibly camera-shy? Snatching humans while they sleep? Turning cows inside-out? Making psychedelic crop circles?

That’s just a lot of hemp.


Sep 12

Where can I find online video lectures for tensors?

I have to give a shout-out to the stunningly lucid video series on youtube by eigenchris. Over the last 2 years, he’s been uploading a series on Tensors, then Tensor Calculus, on into Special Relativity. It’s a pretty good bet he intends to finish on General Relativity.

Eigenchris has uncanny knack for both visualization and pacing; where other authors either hand-wave or get lost in a thicket of formalisms - eigenchris slows down and paints you a picture of what’s going on.

My only caveat (which holds for any lecture series) is - don’t skip. Start at the beginning and give him a chance to build up the topic one step at a time.

That link again is eigenchris .


Sep 14

If Python is so slow with an interpreter, why not write a compiler?

The vast majority of Python programs outsource the slow parts to modules written in a statically typed language.

At the top level of your program, Pythonistas embrace dynamic typing. So the high-level code doesn’t get bogged down in type declarations and all that jazz.

Deeper down, computationally intensive things happen like graphics or array computations. Here you have many operations on many data - but all of the same type. Static typing is way faster. So - Python defers to a graphics module (matplotlib) or a computation module (numpy) for these operations. These modules tend to be written in C/C++.

While this might seem a little ad hoc at first impression, this separation of perspectives lends even greater clarity to your program. The computationally-intensive, static-type-craving operations get isolated and standardized.

Not only is your code easier for others to read now, but a new possibility emerges :
Someone can take the numpy module, and rewrite it so it takes advantage of your NVidia graphics card parallel processing capability. (This is the cupy module.)

You can swap in this super-fast module by changing a single line of code.

TLDR; Native Python is slow because, done right - Python never concerns itself with speed.


Sep 15

Why is there no sign of alien civilisations in the galaxy?

Ah, the Fermi Paradox. Many solutions have been offered in the past, and I’m happy to announce there’s a new contender:

I just recently cooked it up in February. Since then, with the kind help of a couple experienced researchers (and I mean very kind, very extensive help), I have non-zero cause to be hopeful of getting it published in a major scientific journal. Here’s the full paper, https://osf.io/me6sf/

Here’s a preview :

It’s a simple but surprising twist on time dilation. We start with a question :

What is the bleakest reality to confront an Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?

While it’s hard to predict what an advanced alien technology would be capable of, we do know they are still constrained to the same laws of physics as us.

In those laws, we encounter an absolute disaster : No object can travel faster than the speed of light (the C-limit.)

Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. If an ETI on the other side sends a message to Earth, they must wait 200,000 years for a potential reply.

To the best of our knowledge, no alien race - no matter how advanced - can beat the C-limit. A few possible solutions to this have been floated, especially a Wormhole - Wikipedia (Wormhole - Wikipedia) in space-time. But we’ve never observed one and don’t know if it is possible.

OK, so here comes the twist. There is a way an alien race can cheat the C-limit without breaking it : Their entire civilization migrates to a reference frame where time goes by much more slowly.

No wormholes, no new physics - just standard General Relativity. I’ll get to how it’s done in a minute, for now just imagine an alien race can magically slow time on their home world by a factor of 100x.

With the new reference-frame comes a new perspective, and a new possibility :

The transit time for a beam of light across the milky way has reduced by a factor of 100x. A round-trip message to Earth takes 2,000 years, not 200,000.

It is the same for physical exploration. They can travel to Earth and return to their home world where only 2,000 years have elapsed.

While to us they appear slowed by a 100x, their subjective experience is that of surging into the future at 100x speed. Their new relativistic perspective is that space all around them has contracted by a factor of 100. The Milky Way shrinks from 100,000 to 1000 light years.

Now the galaxy awaits their exploration.

OK, how would they manage this time dilation ? I go into details in this paper - https://osf.io/me6sf/

To summarize the paper, if you examine various possibilities - you arrive at only one: The civilization exists in very near orbit to the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the galaxy’s center.

This is (the paper argues) really the only place where such a time dilation would be feasible. When we dig into the physics, a number of happy accidents occur that help us to detect such a structure.

The orbit is exotic. It would have to be in the region where no natural satellite can hold orbit, between the Photon Sphere and the Last Stable Orbit.

The period of the orbit is easy to find. The paper calculates it (it’s within 1% of the orbital period of the Photon Sphere.)

So. The time-dilation hypothesis offers the following things :

* It explains the apparent absence of ETI’s : An advanced and curious race would migrate as soon as possible to near orbit around a SMBH.

* It suggests where to look : toward the SMBHs at a galaxy’s center (the Milky Way’s is called Sagittarius-A*).

* It suggests how to filter the signal. An SMBH creates enormous radio noise, but a time-dilated civilization has an known orbital period. We can then calculate the expected doppler shift that would result in any signal they emit. The result is much like an FM radio signal that can be detected through the radio noise.

Again, all this stuff is laid out in detail in the paper which I just finished (Feb 20, 2020), and which I’m eager for people to read. https://osf.io/me6sf/


Sep 15

How often should I change my engine oil in scooter?

Every 500–600 miles.

When the scooter is new, you should change it right after the first twenty miles.

Then change it again at the first 180 miles.

Then once more at 600 (at which point the break-in period is over. This is also a good time to change out your gear oil.) Then every 500–600 after that.

A scooter only takes a quart, and it’s a simple task for even a non mechanical person to learn to do. So it costs about $2.50 and takes about 10 minutes.

I do mine every other weekend.

This might feel way too frequent compared to a car. But that little scooter engine is working very hard, and only has a quart of oil in it. When you change it out, you’ll see the oil comes out looking very different - full of petroleum byproducts and metal shavings all hell-bent on shortening the life of your engine.


Sep 18

Does "ValueError: invalid literal for int () with base 10: '' throw an error (Python, Python 3.x, parser, int, development)?

Yes. Yes it does :)

This happens when you try to convert from string to integer, but there is some garbage in the string.

int('11')

> 11

Works fine but

int('zz')

> ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'zz'

The issue is usually something more subtle like

int('11 1') # note the space

> ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '11 1'

or

int('') # note empty string

> ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: ''


Sep 19

Is the speed of light the most likely solution to the Fermi paradox? Would we see aliens with real time viewing of the cosmos?

Could be. Your question is worded a little funny, but I’ll run with it …

I recently cooked up a theory (see https://osf.io/me6sf) that goes like this :

There is a way an advanced ETI can cheat the C-limit in order to signal and explore distant worlds : Their entire society migrates to a time-frame where time is slowed by orders of magnitude.

From their point of reference, distances all around them have contracted in proportion to the time dilation. So if their time was slowed by a factor of 100x, 100,000 light years (the diameter of the Milky Way) is only 1,000 years to them. They could bounce a laserbeam off an object across the Milky Way and back in just 2,000 years.

I’ll omit the General Relativity details here, but the paper grinds through the possibilities and arrives at only one : In near orbit to a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center.

So the theory suggests : The stars seem lifeless only because advanced civilizations have abandoned them and migrated to a near-orbit around their galaxy’s central black hole. So we’ve pinned their exact location. We can also deduce that their orbit has features that couldn’t arise naturally from an unguided object. These features would be detectable in any EM emissions or gravity waves the thing transmits.

So the theory is very specific and testable.


Sep 22

If f(x) =3^(x) +10x and g(x) = 4x-2, what is (f-g) (x)?

I see school is back in session. Quora’s a slow and unreliable place to get your homework done.

At least take a stab at it, and ask if your solution is correct.


Sep 22

How much money did Gillette lose in reaction to their 'toxic masculinity' commercial?

They lost about 15% of their total sales totalling $350M over the 6 months after the ad.

This is according to financial analyst, Georgi Georgiev – Medium, who has no apparent political axe to grind. In his article, $350 mln. in 6 Months — The Cost of the 2019 Gillette Advertising Fiasco? he digs through PG’s financial numbers to isolate Gillette’s razor sales.

Now, it’s not fun for executives to explain this sort of thing to the public (and to shareholders.) PG brass assure us that the drop is part of a general decline in razor sales for Gillette.

That “general decline” looks an awful lot like a one-time drop in 2016. We’re also told it’s due to currency exchange rates. Sure - if this graph shows one thing, it’s that Gillette’s razor sales historically swing wildly with currency exchange rates.

We’re also told men are wearing beards now. Except the North American razor market has been increasingly steadily by 3.5% per year, doing so again in 2019. Razor Market Size, Share | Industry Trends Report, 2019-2025

But - who knows? Post hoc does not mean propter hoc, am-i-right?

Go ahead. Hire their ad agency.


Sep 25

I wrote some data related automation scripts in Python and I need to make a UI for my department (considering electron js). What are the best desktop application frameworks (any language, quick development) for this use case?

For quick, cross-platform desktop UI’s I mightily recommend TkInter.

An Introduction to Tkinter (Work in Progress)

There’s also a GUI builder named Page you can use to get a jump-start. (Pro-tip, just use it to get your screen elements and callbacks working. Then grab the code and start banging on that directly. This is true of all GUI builders - hit it and quit it.)

A Python GUI Generator

When it’s time to deploy your software, you have several options to “freeze” your program into an executable - resolving any package dependencies automagically.

Freezing Your Code — The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python


Sep 28

How do I prove if f: A --> B and if g: B--> A satisfy g o f = 1 A then f is one-one and g is onto?

The question is malformed.


Sep 28

What is the best advice that cryptocurrency investors never hear?

“The markets are an instrument for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffet.

Buy. Hold. Don’t lose your pass phrase.


Oct 13

Is it normal to write more than 100 lines of JavaScript code to do a simple thing like an image picker?

Quite. JavaScript has never been one of the more succinct languages.


Oct 15

What OS would you use for an old notebook for programming learning?

LXDE by a mile. LXDE Famous for breathing new life into old hardware, rock-stable and responsive. Since it’s linux-based you’ll be in synch with most of the Open Source development community.

You also can’t go wrong with some other light-weight linux variants : 15 Best Lightweight Linux Distributions for Older Computers in 2020 [With System Requirements]


Oct 16

I’ve vaped almost every day for a few weeks and I’m not addicted. Why is that?

Take your vape and chuck it into the toilet. Right now.

You didn’t do it, did you?

That’s why.


Oct 18

What are the ways to cope with eco anxiety?

There is a dirty little secret that is widely known yet seldomly mentioned. Activists - for even the best of causes - deal in alarm. They are convinced that non-activists need to be shocked into activists. (This belief is sometimes true.)

To this end, they will lie unapologetically. They will distort without any hesitation. And the least of all sins - simply omitting information which contextualizes and tempers their thesis - is something they practice with the universal, automatic regularity of breathing.

I’m an activist (we have to get off oil and get on nuclear completely over the next 50 years, with the financial urgency of WW II.) But I don’t believe in the tactic that regards non activists as too stupid for the truth.

And the truth is that pollution all over the developed world has reduced sharply over the last 50 years : Air Quality - National Summary | US EPA.

There is an exception, of course, with CO2. But CO2 is not a synthetic toxin, it is perfectly organic. If the global warming worst case scenario comes to pass, the natural world will adjust quite comfortably. It’s human society and industry that will be destroyed. Human population will dwindle as crops and economies fail.

Wildlife of all types will reclaim the places we abandon. Plant-life will surge amidst a warmer, more CO2-rich world. Insects and herbivores will eat the plants, and so on.

Run-away global warming is a catastrophe for humans. For other forms of life, it’s a badly needed and perhaps overdue correction to a disruptive and invasive species called homo sapien.


Oct 20

What compelled smokers who became vapers to change, and what are the differences?

For a while I worked in the Prudential Tower in Boston, 20-something floors up :

I was a smoker. I had tried several times in the past to quit using a patch, gum, weird inhaler thing - to no avail.

In order to have a smoke break from this office, I had to go down 2 dozen floors by elevator, but then I was still within the Copley Center shopping complex. I had to walk about 3 city blocks just to get outside to a spot I could smoke. Took like 20 minutes, all told.

I was walking through the mall one day and there was a kiosk where some chick was demo-ing an e-cig. Ah hah! I could totally use this thing stealthily at my desk.

Which I did. I also used the thing at my house, at friend’s houses. In friend’s cars, in stores, theatres, on air planes (before they were banned, mind u.)

I started to prefer it. I was becoming aware of the awful stench of cigarette smoke on my clothes and hands. The nasty sensation of tar in my mouth. This odd yellow coating on my tongue which I always just thought was natural, but which disappeared. Turned out it was oral thrush caused by smoking.

I remember when I was out walking one day. I did something every smoker can relate to, did a sudden panic-check for my cigarettes. Sort of like a non-smoker will suddenly grab their pocket to check for their wallet.

Only it wasn’t my cigarettes at all. I was checking for my vape. My unconscious was redirecting itself; it didn’t care at all where my smokes were.

I remember again, some time later, looking in my back-pack and finding my cigarette pack. They were 3 weeks old; stale and unsmokeable. I tossed them out.

I thought to myself, “Wow. I guess I just quit smoking. Unintentionally.”


Nov 2

How can I recover from secondhand smoke, originating from my neighbour's window, that I can smell through my flat's adjacent windows?

Fretting about this is infinitely more damaging than a stray whiff of smoke. The act of typing the question destroyed more cells on your fingertips than those trace gases ever could.


Nov 10

What isn’t the President allowed to do for safety purposes?

Eat whatever s/he wants.

In George Stephanopoulos’s book, All Too Human - about his time in the Clinton Administration - he relates how Bill Clinton and his team were up late one Saturday night at Camp David.

Somebody ordered pizza to be delivered. When it got there, the Secret Service gave President Clinton a hard “No” about eating any. Among the many threats the Service Service guards against, they have to ensure the President is not poisoned.

Clinton just sat there and sulked while the rest of the staff helped themselves to late night pizza.


Nov 13

What's the best team you've worked as a programmer? Why is it so good?

You’re not going to believe where I worked with the best team ever. And millions of corporate types aren’t going to like my answer at all.

It was a government job. I was working for the DoD (as a contractor) doing wargame simulations for the nuclear Navy. What made it (and us) so great?

Freedom. You’d think that sort of job would be heavily managed and constrained. Assignments coming down from on high, lots of boxes to check and reports to write.

For the direct employees of the DoD, that was true. But not for contractors (about 75% of the personnel.) Contractors did whatever the hell they wanted.

OK - not whatever they wanted. But they had an opportunity to invent their own job. The wargame software was used by military analysts. It was funded by people called COTRs (Contracting Officer's Technical Representative).

If you had an idea - something you wanted to build - all you had to do was get the analysts excited about the prospect. They would lean on the COTR to either write up a contract for you to do it, or else fold your project into these broad elastic contracts that essentially said “keep the analysts happy.”

For example - this was the early 90’s - all the wargames were run on either VAX mainframe or a CRAY supercomputer. Machine time was a bottleneck and simulations would have to wait their turn - often days - before they ran.

Meanwhile, we had acquired a few dozen Unix workstations. Sun and SGI. They were networked together, and were pretty powerful for the time.

One guy made the pitch: There is as much CPU power lying around our network as their was on the mainframes. Let’s try doing the simulations on those ?

No.” was the response he got. Something like, “there’s no way those little things can compete with our mainframe, besides - you program them in C. Our simulations are FORTRAN.” The guy couldn’t convince them to count the megaflops or try out the fortran compiler on Unix.

So he went ahead and ported the simulator anyway. One morning he comes to work with a dozen simulation runs completed and handed them to the analysts. “Whoa! How did you do these so fast; there wasn’t any available computer time?” He casually told them how; they told their bosses and within a week this guy was building a networked supercomputer complete with load balancer, scheduler and all kinds of stuff.

Everybody was eyeing the Unix workstations now. While Fortran was possible, C was their natural language and X-windows their front-end. So the coders (myself included) started to learn C and X-windows.

I decided to try making a 3-dimensional plot of submarines as they dueled under the waves. Taking my cue from that first guy, I didn’t ask if I could. I hacked up a demo and showed the analysts. “Whoah!” That was my next project.

We did not take any training courses. We attended no class or workshop. Much less a ‘boot camp.’ We did something that people had done for generations, but which our current culture seems to believe is impossible :

We found the right books and read them. No instructor - not even google yet to look things up. We learned C and C++ and OOP and all that.

We came up with ideas. 3D rendering of the wargame play-back. A specially designed programming language to encode military tactics. (Another project of mine.) An interactive version of the simulation where the analyst could make live changes. And so on.

They didn’t ask us to report daily on progress. They didn’t ask us weekly. Our time was divided into one-year or 6-month blocks (to coincide with the annual contract cycle.) You had time to think, to learn, to make mistakes, scrap everything and start over : to do it right.

In that environment we did really, really cool stuff. And the analysts loved us, they used our software and sung our praises. To this day I vividly recall the delight of walking into a room full of workstations - and seeing software I’ve written running on their displays.

No JIRA. No standups. No “Agile”. One and only one User Story :

We won the goddamn Cold War.


Nov 19

Police: If you see someone speeding and you get behind them and they won't stop, how can they let you know if it's something like their accelerator is stuck and they don't know what to do?

Never mind the damn cop, put your car in neutral (the N in PRNDL) so you stop accelerating.

If your brakes have given out, steer gently into the guardrail or shoulder of the road to come to a stop. (If time permits, put on your hazards to warn other drivers.)


Dec 2

How do you calculate the average of the values in an array (arrays, c, if statement, development)?

Not even gonna clip off the topic tags (arrays, c, if …) from your homework problem before pasting it in, eh ?


Dec 7

How do I fix my code so that all primes from 1 to 2000000 are all added up and output?

You almost got it, there’s a mistake here :

sum = element+element #oops

Should be

sum = sum + element # declare and initialize sum to zero before the loop

The second mistake is your doing this summation within the loop scanning for prime numbers; you should pull the summation logic out (after the second Next closes the loop.)

For extra credit, there’s a trick you can use that has a huge performance boost. You don’t have to scan all possible divisors from 2 to p-1. You only have to check up to square root p. (If p has a divisor > sqrt(p), then that divisor has a partner < sqrt(p), which you would already have checked.)

This little enhancement makes your program run 1000 xfaster.


Dec 16

What are the best sci-fi short films on the DUST YouTube channel?

I love that DUST showcases so many indie producers. My top 3, in no particular order :

Vikaari

Unearthed

The Last Man


Dec 22

Why does Barron Trump always look so sad, especially when he was together with his father in pictures?

Baron Trump is 14 years old.

A time-honored tradition in the US is that minor children of the President are not discussed in any public forum. The press never even publishes pictures of them, except when posed-for with POTUS or first lady.

We should all uphold that tradition here on Quora. We should hold firm to historical standards of decency, especially when such standards are under attack.

You should not have asked this question. I won’t answer it. Those who did should delete their answers.


Dec 25

What is the difference between a regular text file and a file with a programming language specific extension?

The extension, and nothing else. Change it to .txt and it’ll open up in a text editor.

Source code is just text.


Dec 25

Is “y=4x-2” a function or only a relation? I wonder how I can calculate this.

It’s a relation between x and y. The function is on the right.

y = f(x) = 4x-2


Dec 25

Why does Linus Torvalds get so much credit for Linux, when it is almost indistinguishable from Unix? Although it would certainly take a lot of technical expertise to do this, it does not seem to have required much innovation.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb. He was, however, the first to ‘productize’ it. To bring it to the masses.

Same for Marconi and the radio.

The Wright brothers and the airplane.

And on and on.

“[There are no] million dollar ideas … to prove it: just try to sell one.” — Paul Graham


Tue

What does Mason Cooley mean by their quote “Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood-thirsty”?

The capitalist will take some of your possessions, your time and your labor.

The idealogue - communist, fascist, etc - will imprison you, beat you, murder you or leave you to starve.

They will also take all of your possessions, your time and your labor.


17h ago

What does Mason Cooley mean by their quote “Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood-thirsty”?

The capitalist will take some of your possessions, your time and your labor.

The idealogue - communist, fascist, etc - will imprison you, beat you, murder you or leave you to starve.

They will also take all of your possessions, your time and your labor.



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